A Better Way to Detect Underground Water Leaks
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:
A better way to detect underground water leaks:
You can delay irrigating the lawn or washing the car all you want, but to really make a big dent in water savings we need to stop water waste long before the precious resource ever reaches our taps.
An estimated 20 to 50 percent of water is lost to leaks in North America's supply system -- a major issue as utilities contend with how to sustain a growing population in an era of water scarcity.
"People talk about reducing the time you take showers, but if you think about 50 percent of water flowing through the system being lost, it's another magnitude," said study author Daniel Tartakovsky, a professor of energy resources engineering in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).
In a move that could potentially save money and billions of gallons of water, Tartakovsky, along with Abdulrahman Alawadhi from the University of California, San Diego, have proposed a new way to swiftly and accurately interpret data from pressure sensors commonly used to detect leaks.
In addition to water utilities, Tartakovsky said the method could also be applied to other industries that use pressure sensors for leak detection, such as in oil and natural gas transmission networks that run under the sea and pose additional environmental hazards.
The research was published online Feb. 12 in the journal Water Resources Research.
Abdulrahman Alawadhi, Daniel M. Tartakovsky. Bayesian Update and Method of Distributions: Application to Leak Detection in Transmission Mains. Water Resources Research, 2020; DOI: 10.1029/2019WR025879
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