Utility Week

5 ISSUE 01 OCT/2018 What's the solution? Firms including Yorkshire Water, Northumbrian Water, ames Water and United Utilities have started looking at how satellites could help streamline the process of leak detection, teaming up with Israeli satellite company Utilis, and solutions firm Suez UK, to do so. e satellites capture detailed images that cover 3,500km 2 . ese pictures are then cross-referenced with maps of pipes and other aerial images, before teams are given an exact location to investigate. e process happens quickly with no impact on customers or the public. It could result in problematic leaks in some of the most remote areas of the region being fixed and water being saved more quickly than ever before. Northumbrian Water network performance technical specialist Joseph Butterfield says the new technology is "extremely exciting" and opens up a whole world of leakage detection benefits. " e sheer speed of the process, the detail it gives and the distances the images cover is fantastic and should really help us improve our performance around finding and fixing leaks and saving water," he says. What have water companies found? Yorkshire Water has completed stage one of its £300,000 satellite leak detection trial, which has been "hugely successful". e project helped the leakage team covering Huddersfield and Dewsbury find double the number of leaks compared with traditional methods been used. is, in turn, saved 0.5 megalitres of water a day. e firm is now moving into the second phase of the trial, which will focus on trunk mains in rural Yorkshire. Severn Trent carried out an initial trial with the satellite around Birmingham, Coventry, Worcester and Gloucester, from which it took away numerous learnings for a second trial in Staffordshire and Nottinghamshire. e company managed to double its leakage hit rate and, in fact, if you take the number of leaks found per satellite point, its hit rate increased to 75 per cent. Hit rate is the number of satellite points the company investigated where it found at least one leak as a percentage of the total. During the hot weather experienced by the UK recently, the company was able to take a high-res satellite photo of the region and pick out green patches in areas above its pipes, which suggested it had a leak issue in that area. is allowed the company to focus its teams on areas it might not otherwise have spotted. What next? Although it is still early days, water companies see a role for the technology. Yorkshire Water says it wants satellites to help it meet a leakage reduction target of 40 per cent over the next seven years. It also says it is working with other water companies, discussing how the industry can make the most of the technology. Meanwhile Severn Trent's head of innovation Dr Bob Stear said at the time the company announced its trial in November last year that the technology was promising. "We can see clearly the value that this level of geospatial data insight can deliver, and we fully expect to be able to improve our costs and efficiency by making better informed decisions when finding and fixing leaks." A pioneering study has found a way to turn sunlight into fuel. Researchers at Cambridge University, have successfully mimicked photosynthesis in order to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. is could have global implications for the energy industry, because the hydrogen produced when the water is split has the potential to be an unlimited source of green renewable energy. Katarzyna Sokół, first author and PhD student at St John's College, said: " e approach could be used to couple other reactions to see what can be done, learn from these reactions and then build Here's an synthetic, more robust pieces of solar energy technology." Artificial photosynthesis has been around for decades, but it has not been successfully used to create renewable energy because it relies on the use of catalysts, which are often expensive and toxic, meaning any findings can't be scaled up to an industrial level. is new research is part of the emerging field of semi-artificial photosynthesis that aims to overcome the limitations of fully artificial photosynthesis, by using enzymes rather than catalysts to create the desired reaction. Sokół hopes the findings will now enable the development of innovative model systems for solar energy conversion.

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