how digital tools can prevent water loss

About 3,108,000,000 litres of water are lost through leaks every day in England and Wales. That means roughly one fifth of potable water leaving the nation’s treatment plants never reaches the tap.

In times of water scarcity losing so much treated water comes at significant cost, both environmentally and to company budgets. Leaks also lead to a substantial waste of energy, which is during the cleaning and pumping process, and wasted chemicals used to treat the water.

Although leakages have reduced by about 35% since the mid 1990s, the pressure is on to cut losses further. Ofwat, the water regulator in England and Wales, is assessing business plans for the period of 2015-2020. Included in this process is the requirement for all water utilities to provide leak reduction plans with targets against which their performance can be assessed.

Smart tech
Replacing antiquated or damaged pipes alone will not be enough. Now water companies are pinning their hopes on an emerging of smart technologies to get on top of the problem.

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These digital tools use the latest internet-based software and hardware to gather, collate and crunch real-time data on conditions within the water network. The best of the gizmos can not only spot a problem, but automatically fix it as well.

According to Dr Tom Arnot, a water sustainability expert at Bath University’s Water Innovation and Research Centre, these techniques hold huge promise. “If you were able to monitor pressure and flow sensors across the whole region of a water supply company, you could then pick up hotspots or issues across the entire network,” he says. “Essentially, what you then have is a real-time dashboard of your water supply.”

Anglian Water is experimenting with these tools. Working with the engineering firm i2O Water, it has started using automated value controllers at 15 points across its network. Pilot projects see the installation of battery-powered monitoring and control devices linked to the network’s flow meters and valves. These transmit readings using antennae to the company’s central information platform.

“Once you have that information, you can create a software programme to work out what is actually happening within the network,” says Stephen Bold, the chairman at i2O.

Taking things further
Monitoring is just the first stage. Step two sees i2O’s proprietary software run the data gathered to understand patterns of demand and supply, and their relationship to pressure and flow – two critical factors for causing leaks and burst pipes.

“We use artificial intelligence to learn these relationships, enabling us to create control models. These are then sent down to battery-powered controllers, which autonomously use this model to continuously adjust the [pressure] valves to account for changes in demand,” Bold says.

Similar technology also autonomously controls pump stations. Again, the idea is to optimise water pressure in line with consumer demand. In the areas where this technology has been tested, Anglian Water’s losses due to burst pipes and leaks have been reduced by 56% and 40% respectively.

“These smart controls enable us to control our network to much finer degrees than any manually-controlled system previously could,” says David Ward, Anglian Water’s head of water networks.

To date, i2O has installed about 1,850 systems in 22 countries, saving 235m litres of water per day. The firm recently secured £8m in private funding to expand its research activities.

Elsewhere
Other innovations in the water industry include the use of acoustic or vibration detection sensors to identify and locate leaks. Severn Trent Water has developed a leak noise correlator with Loughborough University and Ontario-based company Echologics. Its LeakFinderST technology pinpoints leaks in plastic pipes, which conventional sensors find it difficult to trace.

“We can now find leaks more quickly, leaks we couldn’t previously detect, and we can also find leaks more accurately,” says Keiron Maher, research and development manager at Severn Trent Water. “One of the big advantages is not digging a hole [to resolve a leak] and finding that we’re not quite in the right place.”

Severn Trent Water also uses an acoustic sensor called Sahara, which can reportedly detect pinhole-sized leaks with 99% accuracy. Developed by Alberta-based infrastructure monitoring firm Pure Technologies, these sensors are fitted with a small parachute and are especially useful for mains pipes that have a large diameter.

Changes to Ofwat’s price review process could open the door for greater investment in water-based smart technology. In the past, the regulator’s pricing model showed a bias towards capital investments for new infrastructure by water utilities rather than operating expenditure for enhanced services. But under new rules, the two will be given equal regulatory treatment.

“This provides a real opportunity for water companies to find innovative ways to deliver the services their customers want,” says Simon Markall, a spokesperson for Ofwat, “not least working with smart technologies to find new ways of fixing leaks more efficiently

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainab...ter-loss-leaks


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