Bottom-up innovation for sustainable leakproof Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) pipe: Design method, ECC material, and pipe structure

Low-carbon, low-cost, and durable water pipelines are urgently needed for sustainable cities. In this study, low carbon, cost-effective, leakproof Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) pipes were developed benefiting from the proposed ECC pipe design model and material innovation. The proposed model has been experimentally validated on ECC beam and ECC pipe. The developed desert sand Engineered Cementitious Composites attained the highest tensile strength (12.6 MPa) and ductility (12.1 %) among the published desert sand ECCs, enabling a sustainable ECC pipe with thinner wall thickness while attaining higher performance. Under the three-edge loading test, the deformation capacity of ECC pipe was 4–6 times that of steel reinforced concrete (RC) pipes. Even with two-thirds the wall thickness of an RC pipe, ECC pipes reached 2.6 times in load capacity of the highest Class V pipes (ASTM C76). The developed ECC pipes hold promise for the next generation of sustainable pipelines.