Water from underground pipes often leaks. Particularly, in countries with an antiquated underground waterpipe infrastructure. In the case of Greece, for example, leaks are estimated to constitute up to 50% of total consumption. Worse, many of these leaks are extremely difficult to find and repair due to the lack of detailed mapping of the network.
Solutions are available, though. For example, there is a recently developed technology, which identifies defects and leaks, monitors the buried infrastructures and evaluates water pipe conditions. It results from the WATERPIPE research project, funded by the EU and completed in 2009.
“[The technology] was designed to provide a three dimensional representation of the underground waterpipe network and at the same time provide information about the condition of both metallic and non-metallic pipes,” explains Matthaios Bimpas, a researcher who was involved in the project based at the i-Sense team of the Research Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.
Read the full article here