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Using data in the battle against ageing water infrastructure

By intouch * posted 23-05-2016 16:43

  

Water utilities will be using computer programs and data to predict and reduce pipe breakages in the not-too-distant future, an experienced water industry researcher says.
 



University of South Australia Dean of Research and Innovation Professor Christopher Saint is part of a team from the university undertaking a number of open water data projects – one of the potential applications for which is in the struggle against ageing infrastructure.

It is a salient topic for Adelaide: a spate of destructive burst water pipes and water mains across the city this year have attracted media attention, and raised questions as to the cause of the breakages.

However, Saint, who managed SA Water Corporation’s research and development portfolio until 2011, says while Adelaide does have “aggressive” water with a high salt content, it does not have a monopoly on breakages.

“Yes, we’ve had a lot of breakages, but Adelaide’s not really getting more than anyone else,” he says.

“There was a survey done fairly recently when they looked at about 14 utilities across Australia and SA Water Corporation were the fourth best in terms of not having pipe breakages.

“When you look at the ones that were better, it was utilities like Gold Coast Water where the infrastructure is more modern.”

Saint says the infrastructure challenges SA Water Corporation is facing – that is, that the infrastructure is aging – are not unique to Australia.

“Although most local authority water sensitive urban design (WSUD) stormwater infrastructure would have gone in only in the last few years, drinking water infrastructure’s been in for over 100 years,” Saint says.

“If you look at the UK model, they get a lot of breakages too. They’ve had a lot over the past 30 years, because their infrastructure predates Australia’s by about that amount.”

“Whether it’s wastewater systems or drinking water, the issues we’ve got are very similar.” “Sewers are also deteriorating at a high rate due to their age in many locations.”

Using data to predict pipes at risk of breaking



As the amount of data collected on water infrastructure grows, so too do the potential uses for it, Saint says.

“There are a lot of sensors in the systems now – you can measure pressure differences, you can measure temperature, you can measure flow rates,” he explains.

“You can use that to feed algorithms – you can take a whole lot of things like what the pipes are made from, what the water quality is like, the temperature, the surrounding soil structure, and you can build a matrix of where you’re likely to see more pipe breakages.”

This is not the stuff of science fiction – Saint says this technology is already being utilised, and expects it will be widely used within a decade.

“At the speed things are changing, I’d say five to 10 years. It’s hard to put an absolute figure on it, but I think it’s quite likely.”

Water utilities’ interests may speed up this process.

“The water industry is very interested in this, because most of their assets lie in infrastructure,” Saint explains.

“Someone like SA Water Corporation has about $10 billion worth of assets below ground. They’ve got a big investment, and it’s in their interest to try and maintain it best they can.”

FLOW and FLOWED



Using funding from the Australian National Data Services and in partnership with SA Water Corporation, Saint and university colleagues undertook a major water quality open data aggregation project, which was completed in 2015.

The completed Free Library on Water, or FLOW, looked at water quality and made data available from several South Australian projects that looked specifically at water quality issues.

This year, the team began expanding on the original project in part two: FLOWED, or Free Library on Water and Environmental Data, with the aim of looking at things like pump life in systems. The project will run until 2018.

“I’m quite keen to extend it to looking at whether we can better predict mains breaks as well, by utilising a range of data and seeing if there are any correlations,” Saint says.

“We’d like to get an overview of the research that is being done at the moment into the production and management of water infrastructure.”

How climate change will strain water infrastructure 



Taking a wider, international focus, FLOWED will also use climate change data to determine the influence such changes may have on infrastructure life in water systems.

“We’ve been involved in projects to try and predict, in South Australia, what the likely impact of climate conditions will be in the next 50 to 100 years,” Saint says. 

“We can expect less rain overall, but we will be expecting more extreme events – that’s the kind of thing that will cause flooding and will cause movement in soil as well. It could well be that the more intense events are going to be more destructive to infrastructure.”

Research from the University of New South Wales recently published in Geophysical Research Letters corroborates this.

Professor Ashish Sharma and Conrad Wasko from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering analysed data from 1300 rain gauges and 1700 temperature stations across Australia, to examine the effect air temperature had on the intensity and size of storms.

“As warming proceeds, storms are shrinking in space and in time,” Wasko said.

“They are becoming more concentrated over a smaller area, and the rainfall is coming down more plentifully and with more intensity over a shorter period of time.

“When the storm shrinks to that extent, you have a huge amount of rain coming down over a smaller area.”

Sharma says this trend will put existing stormwater infrastructure under pressure.

“That’s because the stormwater infrastructure cannot handle the rain, and part of the reason there’s more rain is the increase in global temperatures.”

Image: Professor Christopher Saint
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