Plugging Leaks and Saving Water in Asia
Almost 29 billion cubic meters of water are lost each year in Asia due to leaks and water theft from water networks. Acoustic-based technologies from Echologics can enable water companies and utilities to locate leaks quickly and without ground excavations.
“The Echoshore®-TX and Echoshore-DX technologies work on various types of pipe material, and they continuously monitor the pipes to detect new leaks as soon as they form, so that water utilities and companies can repair them immediately and avoid catastrophic failures or wastage of water,” says Mark Nicol, Regional Director, Asia.
Echologics®’ other offerings include the EchoShore-M system, which is a lightweight, portable and rugged version of the Echoshore-TX solution and is meant for temporary projects or to be quickly moved around a water network to multiple locations to search for leaks.
Ongoing projects in the region have surveyed more than 2,000km of distribution and transmission mains and located more than 150 leaks, allowing water utilities to plug them and cut water losses by more than 20 million liters a day. The technology’s deployment required minimal site preparation and does not impact water service.
Another Echologics solution, the ePulse condition assessment solution, has been used in the United States, Canada and Western Europe to identify the condition of buried pipes. The technology uses sound-based sensors attached to existing contact points, such as fire hydrants and valves, or directly to the pipes, to capture how long it takes for a generated sound wave to travel along the pipe. The speed at which the sound wave travels indicates the condition of the pipe wall.
