Infrastructure Development Since 1981
Infrastructure Development Since 1981
Water loss is a global problem across continents and the percentage varies from developed to poor nations in terms of lost quantity. Recently, Global Water Intelligence (GWI) has carried out a survey amongst the world's top 40 water markets suggesting that European countries are in a better position to manage their losses than Asian and African countries. The water loss percentage is as low as 4% in Netherlands, 6% in Denmark, and 7% in Japan. India is lagging behind other countries with shockingly high at 50% even behind the African nation; Algeria with 45%. Among better managed countries, Australia and Germany with 8% and Israel with 9% have managed to limit their water losses significantly. Even the smaller nations like Kazakhstan and Czech Republic with limited resources have managed it in a much better way under 20% than the large countries like Brazil at 38% and Italy and Jordan with 41% and 47% respectively.
Water loss or non-revenue water is the top most issues facing by the water utilities. According to a report, an estimated 8 trillion litres of treated drinking water leaks each year from out-dated systems in the US only. Across UK, about 1.1 trillion litres of water is lost every year. The average household's leaks can account for nearly 45,500 litres of water wasted every year and 10 per cent of homes have leaks that waste 400 litres or more per day. India is not behind in this scenario and household leaks in the country approximately waste nearly 3.4 trillion litres of water annually. The World Bank has calculated that the cost of non-revenue water due to frequent to leaks along with standard theft and billing errors exceeds $14 billion globally.
There are ways to control water loss with better monitoring and control by dividing the network into smaller sections into district metering areas, an efficient technique that helps in easier planning and control for the operators. The pressure management is considered to be the most cost-effective leakage prevention activity, and water utilities should adopt and invest in improving it. Most pipe bursts happen due to ongoing pressure fluctuations that constantly force pipes to expand and contract, resulting in stress fractures. Pressure should be kept at a minimum to protect pipes, though it should not be so low as to affect the consumer's needs.
There are three steps utilities can take to use AMI leak detection to conserve water: metered leak detection, district metering leak detection and acoustic leak detection. Each method leverages specific aspects of AMI technology to detect leaks in different ways. AMI solutions transform data collected through the system into valuable and actionable intelligence for users across the utility, empowering the entire organization to address conservation and revenue protection.
The AMI will help in improvements in supply network and utilities can reduce NRW level in their service areas. It will ultimately result in reducing the amount of water that utilities must extract, treat and pump to meet the demand. This would also reduce the amount of energy required to pump the water and the amount of carbon emissions produced, providing other diverse benefits.
Water utilities across the globe are using sensors in their networks of pipes and junctions in an effort to detect leaks. Sensors have been used for years to some extent but with the water scarcity and increasing supplies to meet the demand, water utilities are under tremendous pressure to control the loss, plug the leaks and make water available and accountable. The advanced sensors use accelerometers, the same technology that detects movement on smartphones as it pick up vibrations that may be associated with a leak somewhere along the length of a pipe.
Sensors are being deployed including acoustic loggers which have the capability to listen for the characteristic hum created by a leaky pipe and the artificial intelligence (AI) system will refine on thousands of these recordings to issue an alert with precise location. A sensor with AI system is very successful as it can pick up leaks with more than 90 per cent accuracy. Real-time data can be used to identify the status of a water distribution system at a particular point in time. Through the analysis of collected data, various performance trends under different conditions can be identified and worked upon. The analysed real-time data can be further used to evaluate the performance of the system under different conditions and adjust accordingly.
The other advance technology that helps to make water pipes smart is narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) communications, a means of transmitting signals from thousands of remote sensors that uses just a small part of bandwidth to do so. It is very effective in leak detection as pipe sensors sends far more frequent updates to a central control system without draining their batteries which has several years of lifetime capacity. Water utilities in several countries are putting NB-IoT acoustic logger sensors around its network that are designed to wake up at the designated time when water supply begins in the city to record audio from a pipe and transmit the same to a central control system. Should a leak be heard, the system can calculate roughly where it might be along the selected length of a pipe based on the speed at which sound travels through the pipe's material. The collected data gets sent to the software which compares it with neighbouring loggers to see if two loggers have heard the same noise. It helps the engineers managing the operations at the control unit to take informed and precautionary measures before the leak could become a problem.
The importance of pure and hygienic water is very high in Japan and Tokyo is having one of the most effective water systems in the world. They have zero tolerance against water leakage, and due to the commitment of repairing the water leakage in the same day has helped them to reduce the leakage rate from 20 per cent in 1956 to just about 2 per cent in 2018 and it is further working to plug even this minimal leak. There is a program called the Bureau of Waterworks which aims to manage the essential water resources in effective ways, this program takes preventive measures to stop leakage before any collateral damage may happen.
The Bureau of Waterworks in Tokyo had completely replaced the service pipes in the city's water distribution system. Every pipe connecting the large diameter water mains pipe to narrower household and commercial pipes was changed to a stainless steel one by replacing the old lead and ductile iron pipes that reduced the break and leaks significantly. Their efforts bear the good results in terms of savings of approximately 200 million cubic metres of water and nearly $ 4 billion that excluding the indirect cost benefits such as reduced reservoir development, repair and maintenance.