Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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32 | JUNE 2018 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Innovation Zone Inline leak detection AquaNav (Qinov8) Elsewhere, Qinov8 has announced that it is in talks with all the major UK water suppliers, including Southern Water, Affinity Water, Thames Water, Welsh Water and Yorkshire Water, as well as international companies for its new leak detection technologies. Its AquaNav system is used inside large plastic water mains and features a transmitter enclosed in a buoyant spherical carrier around the size of a tennis ball. It freeflows through the pipe, drawn by the force of the escaping water, as an above-ground operator follows AquaNav at walking pace with a handheld receiver. Once the AquaNav reaches the source of the leak, the device is drawn to and plugs the hole; as there is then no moving water, it is held in place and sends a signal to the receiver to notify the operator. The AquaNav, which can be inserted and extracted via hydrants, can identify leaks as small as as 20 litres/min and provides a location within 2 (0.6m). It is aimed at mains located up to 16 (4.9m) underground, although Qinov8 can offer a larger transmitter for a depth range of 45 for the larger diameter trunk mains. AquaPea (Qinov8) Qinov8's WRAS-approved AquaPea system, meanwhile, works on a similar principle but is designed to repair leaks in smaller, domestic water pipes – when the AquaPea is drawn to the hole, the material hardens and repairs the crack from the inside. It has been tested on copper, lead and polyethylene pipes between 15mm and 90mm and the company is working on using it on larger diameter mains. PipeGuard (MIT) Internationally, there are several inline leak detection systems in the works. It was announced last year that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers were working on PipeGuard, a small robotic device resembling a shuttlecock, with its so rubber 'skirt' – the membrane sensor – filling the diameter of the pipe. The device, which can operate in water or sewage pipes, logs its position as it travels through, detecting small variations in pressure via the pull at the edges of the skirt. Using that information, which is collected upon extraction, Pipeguard Robotics uses a cloud-based analytics platform to create a Google Map of leaks, offering information on their location and size. Field test data shows PipeGuard can detect leaks as small as 1 US gallon/minute (3.785 litres/min) to within 1 (305mm). Each robot is developed to fit the size of the pipeline it will be inserted into, although they can adapt to pipe diameter changes of up to 20 per cent, and the developers have so far built robots for pipe diameters ranging from 50mm and 300mm. PipeGuard, which can be inserted and extracted through T junctions and hydrants, requires a minimum pressure of 0.8 Bar (or 10 psi) and minimum flow speed of 0.3 /s (0.1 m/s). PipeFish (USC Viterbi) PipeFish, from researchers at USC Viterbi's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), operates in similar fashion – moving passively with the water flow and inserted via hydrants – but captures real-time video using a 360-degree camera that records at a minimum of 30 frames per second, as well as using sensors to collect data and log its position. The robot features an onboard microcomputer that controls lights, sensors and the camera. The developers plan to include further sensors to collect additional information, including flow rate, air pockets and chemicals, while the PipeSnake – several PipeFish tethered together – has been used to handle the twists and turns of more complex water networks. Creator Wei-Min Shen began working with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to develop and test the robot around 18 months ago. PipeFish. Picture credit: Caitlin Dawson Picture credit: MIT Qinov8's Michael and Mark Quinn with their AquaNav and AquaPea devices