Water utilities must get even smarter

In the conservative water industry, most drinking-water companies rely on acoustic techniques to find leaks, while both drinking water and wastewater companies use CCTV to survey pipe systems. Both techniques are labour-intensive and scale poorly, offering scattershot and often inadequately documented information on pipe networks.

Other incumbent technologies are useful in a narrow band of applications tracer gas, for instance, is a powerful technique when applied locally to small lines but do not solve utilities’ problems of pinpointing leaks across a miles-long water network, according to a Lux Research report Plugging the Leaks: The Business of Water Infrastructure Repair.

Recent major infrastructure repair projects in the US and parts of Europe show that without more advanced automated techniques to characterise pipe networks and accurately locate problems, costs quickly run into the billions of dollars over a decade for individual cities.

Lux, for example, cited how one major city with 18,000 miles of pipes estimates that it costs $8 million (£4.9 million) to reduce leaks by 1,000m3 per day. With 600,000m3 per day in current leaks, any improvement that directs crews to major leaks faster and more precisely offers massive potential savings.

The challenge is to remove as much of the guesswork out of infrastructure repair as possible by efficiently locating issues in drinking and wastewater pipes, and alerting operators in real time.

Smart infrastructure monitoring options are clearly the way forward in this regard: monitoring two smart meters along a single stretch of pipe offers a direct measurement of actual system losses of all kinds, not just leaks but also theft and other system failures. Smart meters are also labour-saving and inexpensive and can collect huge amounts of valuable data that is easy to understand.

However, Lux reported: “Smart meters are a hard sell in the water industry, because most water companies have minimal crews and lack the resources to analyse a new flood of information.” The smart meter market, it added, “is top-heavy with major corporations willing to hook a water company up to its customers and sprinkle meters throughout the distribution system.

“But understaffed, overworked water companies don’t just need graphs and charts that drift imperceptibly from the baseline as leaks occur and grow. They need another set of eyes on that data, one that will pay attention to every slight trend in every pipe and tell them when a problem arises.”
The sticking point is that smart metering requires specialised automation tools, with the network mapped by sector, with real-time alerts of possible problems. So for the vast majority of drinking water companies, they only make sense when coupled with computer management.

Flood of new data
The drinking water industry has to adopt automated methods such as ’algorithmic event predictors’ and leak locators to make use of the flood of new data from smart monitoring systems, said Lux.

Enter Israeli start-up TaKaDu, which recently won the International Water Association award for its implementation of water infrastructure monitoring at Thames Water the UK’s largest water and wastewater services provider. instead links existing sensors into its network and runs the data through proprietary software. The software sold as a service remotely monitors drinking water networks by looking for and triangulating the location of problems based on data derived from existing flowmeters and other sensors in the network.

This information is provided to the customer via reports, databases and graphical information, but, most importantly, as event alerts that tell operators what problems are arising and where. These real-time alerts and views give the utility’s staff increased visibility and greater control over its network assets and events.

As a measure of how badly water companies need services of this type, TaKaDu only announced its first paying customer in April of 2010, but now estimates its addressable market at $5 billion.

Thames Water is also listed as a client by Echologics, whose acoustic monitoring technology can locate small leaks down to a few feet of pipe without requiring “an expert with decades of experience manning the headphones at three in the morning”. The active, pinging systems work for plastic pipes as well as iron and concrete, and are not limited to the noisy leaks that passive techniques can pick up.

The effective management of of drinking water and wastewater pipelines today requires the adoption of a range of smart monitoring techniques

Echologics’ core technology is an acoustic noise correlator, using separate transducers and sensors temporarily coupled to the pipe, fire hydrants, or other parts of the infrastructure. An acoustic wave induced into the pipe at one point is detected further along the pipe. In conjunction with appropriate PC-based data processing, the technique yields data both on leaks and also on average pipe thickness.

Another interesting start-up, I2O, offers a simple strategy for reducing wear and tear in drinking water lines. Applying smart pressure detectors and simple, robust controllers to water lines’ existing pressure relief valves, water companies can keep pressure to a minimum, minimising leaks and blowouts, while supplying the necessary pressure to customers. Just lowering the average pressure with real-time feedback saves around 20% of leaking water and reduces blowouts by a similar amount.

Wastewater systems
Wastewater companies, with the same mandate to reduce leaks but none of the economic benefits drinking water companies enjoy for reducing non-revenue water, likewise face major issues discovering leaks. Moreover, unlike pressurised drinking water systems, wastewater systems cannot rely on pressure discrepancies to spot problems; something needs to travel through a buried pipe network to determine its condition.

Traditionally, CCTV cameras aboard remote-control probes have served this purpose for pipes too small for human access. However, CCTV is difficult to automate, making whole-network surveys prohibitively expensive. And bored operators are likely to record only a fraction of the subtle visual information they observe during the surveys that are done.

There are, however, some promising developments in this space, including LIDAR (light detection and ranging) laser-mapping technology hat yields a comprehensive 3D profile of the interior of sewage pipes. It can be easily automated, works with any type of pipe, and the data it presents meshes well with whole-network software to give utilities maps of their most critical infrastructure repair needs.

Without the benefit of pressure meters, the sewage industry must rely on meter-by-meter inspections of its hundreds of miles of pipes, and historical dry weather flow rates to know which sections to repair.

One company automating this process, however, is Redzone Robotics. Unlike most of its competitors that use remote-control CCTV drones, Redzone employs fully autonomous robots studded with instrumentation, including LIDAR, for pipe inspections and which are capable of obstacle avoidance. One operator can deploy multiple robots at a time, retrieving them at the next access point and downloading their data without having to monitor them in real time.

Just as important as its robotics technology, two years ago Redzone acquired Icom3, a software asset-management company. Information retrieved by its machines now flows seamlessly into network maps, automatically pinpointing current weak points and dislocations and helping wastewater operators to locate leaks.