Tavi Murray
Graham Stuart, L.Scudder
Reduction of leakage from the water supply pipes is a vital strategy in the improvement of sustainable use of water, the most fundamental of our natural resources. The importance of leak reduction becomes apparent when leakage rates of 40% are reported. The biggest problem in leakage control is not the repair, but the initial leak location. Current technologies have been developed over the last three decades for metallic pipes. Present leak location methods use the propagation of noise along the pipe, this noise is caused by the water escaping from the pipe, the air getting into the pipe and the water circulating in the cavity created by the leak outside the pipe. However these technologies are inadequate when applied to the problem of leaks from plastic water pipes, as the acoustic attenuation in plastic pipes is up to five times greater than the attenuation in metallic pipes.
The objectives of the research are therefore to assess present levels of leak location technology; to assess suitability of several geophysical methods applied to leak location from plastic water pipes; and to carry out field trials of the most suitable geophysical methods. The application environment (urban) is inherently noise rich with several other service pipes in the subsurface and a tarmac cover. This will lead to an increase in the geophysical noise visible, this makes the precision and accuracy of the developed method paramount as false positives are unacceptable.
Lockwood, R.A., Murray, T., Stuart, G.W. and Scudder, L. (2002) Leak location using the frequency domain electromagnetic method, in Proceedings of the 64th meeting of the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers, May 27-30, 2002, Florence, Italy.
Lockwood, R.A., Murray, T., Stuart, G.W. and Scudder, L. (2002) New solutions to leak location from plastic water pipes. in Proceedings of the British Geomorphological Research Student Postgraduate Symposium, April 16-18, 2002, Leeds, UK.
Lockwood, R.A., Murray, T., Stuart, G.W. and Scudder, L. (2001) Detection of leaks from water pipes using non-invasive geophysical methods. in Proceedings of the 7th meeting of the Environmental and Engineering Geophysical Society (European Section), September 2-6, 2001, Birmingham, England.