Ignacio Muñoz
Papers # 2016 Berlin
Along the years, plastic pipes have become a main solution for water transportation and distribution, gaining market share to the traditional materials. Anyway, and considering our current situation as “stable”, we could clearly see that there is a trend of applications where materials have a significant market share and can be considered as “preferred solution”. The following chart roughly shows the spectrum of the preferred solution in the variables of diameters and nominal pressure.
This distribution has many reasons, but the most important are local conditions, tradition, local industry, and, of course, competitiveness.
Competitiveness is always a deal, as usually it is wrongly simplified to pipe price. Many aspects, as installation cost and speed, maintenance, pumping energy, flow capacity, etc., are usually underestimated and not taken into account in infrastructures that should last 50 years or more, being in the long term much more important economically wise than the pipe price.
Below 16 bar pressure class and small-medium sizes plastics like HDPE and PVC-U are the dominant material, but above PN 16 still DI maintain a clear strong position, and as far as the diameter goes larger than 400mm (16”), GFRP starts to take share as result of its low prices. Also DI also is a popular solution when the diameter grows.
PVC-O is a product that can compete in all these segments taking into account different considerations
