Aquarius Spectrum, a leading provider of advanced monitoring and leak detection solutions, recently won two Pipe Condition Assessment (PCA) projects in two large cities in Israel.
In the City of Holon, Aquarius deployed 750 acoustic sensors to cover the entire water network. The sensors are permanently monitoring the underground pipeline on daily basis, providing accurate data on the development of hidden leaks, as well as analysis of the pipes condition in order to prioritize the replacement of faulty pipeline sections.
Mei-Shikma Water Utility is responsible for supplying drinking water to 250,000 customers in the local authorities: Holon, Or Yehuda, Azur and Beit Dagan, operating a water pipeline in the length of 400km.
Arik Mula, CEO of Mei-Shikma, says: “Mei-Shikma is always looking for new ways to improve its NRW rates and be more efficient. Reducing water loss is a constant, daily battle of the utility that up until now relied on customers calling the support centre to report visible bursts and leaks. With Aquarius technology which is now implemented on the entire water network using 750 sensors it is now possible to trace background leaks before their surface and been reported by the customers. The Aquarius’ system doesn’t stop there and also analyses the condition of the pipes and provides us pipe condition analysis reports to focus the budget and efforts on the pipes that really needs replacement vs. replacing by pipe age.”
PCA is a powerful tool for Water Utilities which enables them to replace the right malfunctioning pipes and analyze the cause of the fault in the pipe. Aquarius Spectrum has gained extensive experience in interpreting leak development dynamics in pipes and their relation to pipe condition assessment.
Aquarius PCA is integrating a few methods: Leak statistics – analyzing the history of pipe breaks and their exact locations; Leak development dynamics analyzes the growth rate of the leak. The density of leaks in each pipe section and the leak growth rate are strongly connected to the pipe condition; Identify the main pipe types that have severe deterioration and have increasing failure rate and are likely to break.
In addition, the large pipes of the City of Tel Aviv, will be covered by 150 new sensors that combines both hydrophones and pressure sensors, which will detect the hidden leakages and analyze the pipeline condition.
