###### Abstract  
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes have been extensively applied in water supply network fields. Understanding the mechanical properties and burst pressure of PVC pipes is necessary because a large number of pipes rupture due to excessive internal water pressure. In this paper, a practical approach based on the average shear stress yield (ASSY) criterion was proposed to assess the PVC pipe burst pressure. In addition, the PVC uniaxial tensile tests and the pipe burst tests were carried out to determine the material characteristic parameters and burst pressure of the PVC pipe. Furthermore, a finite element analysis (FEA) of PVC burst pressure was also performed based on the tangent intersection (TI) method to validate the proposed method and experimental results. Moreover, the impact of material parameters and pipe size, such as the strain hardening exponent and standard dimension ratio (SDR) on bursting pressure, were investigated. The comparison with the proposed theoretical model and the experimental and FEA results shows that the burst pressure derived from ASSY was consistent with the experimental data, with a relative error ranging from \(-2.76\%\) to \(2.65\%\), which is more accurate compared to other yield criteria. The burst pressure obtained by the ASSY approach declined with the increase of the hardening exponent \(n\) and increased with the increase of SDR. Therefore, the burst pressure solution-based ASSY proposed in this paper is an adequately suitable and precise predictive tool for assessing the failure pressure of PVC pipes. burst pressure; PVC pipes; burst test  
Water pipe rupture is related to the mechanical properties of the pipe material and environment, while internal pressure load is also an important factor leading to pipe burst [9]. According to a study by the Plastic Pipe Database Committee (PPDC) of the United States, design and installation errors account for the largest proportion of PVC pipe failure causes, followed by material defects (Figure 2), meaning that inappropriate pipe products with working pressure specifications that do not meet the requirements were selected and installed in the pipe engineering design and construction. In addition, several researchers have found that extreme water pressure caused by water hammers is one of the most common factors affecting PVC pipe bursts [10; 11; 12; 13]. For the ultimate strength analysis, the burst pressure of a pipe is an important parameter in PVC pipeline design and safe operation, which is determined as the internal water pressure resulting in pipe rupture. Therefore, accurate burst pressure prediction is needed in support of pipe engineering critical assessment. In the past few decades, evaluation methods for the pipe burst pressure have been developed to precisely estimate the failure pressure when the pipe cracking will occur. Currently, there are a variety of evaluation models to determine the pipe burst pressure [14; 15; 16; 17]. Figure 1: The proportion of broken water pipes and failures [2]. Figure 2: Failure cause of PVC pipes [2]. In 1950, [PERSON] developed theoretical solutions based on the [PERSON] criterion. In mid-1990s, [PERSON] et al. proposed a calculation model for thin-walled pipes with [PERSON] and [PERSON] criteria and used test data for verification [18]. Moreover, the CIS (cylindrical instability stress) concept was proposed by [PERSON] et al. for evaluation of the internal pressure bearing capacity of thin-walled pipes [19]. Numerical FEM investigations were developed by considering heavy cyclic thermal loads acting on the structure and a LCF criterion based on the [PERSON] equivalent strain concept [20; 21]. These findings imply that the experimental data are inconsistent with those criteria due to the pipe being under complex stress states when burst occurred. Therefore, more a precise yield criterion is necessary to develop an accurate model for pipe burst pressure prediction.