Neptune project could help water firms spot leaks

Many UK water supplies have been segmented into district metering areas (DMAs), which have defined and permanent boundaries. These allow water flow into and around each district to be monitored, enabling the location of breaks and leakages to be identified.

Despite this, the UK’s water utilities are still losing millions of litres of water through such networks each year. For every litre of water lost, another litre of water has to be treated and pumped through the network to compensate, increasing the cost of production, reducing the available water supply and contributing to carbon emissions.

Although water utilities use sensors to measure pressure and flow into and around the DMAs, the real-time data acquired and sent via their supervisory control and data-acquisition (SCADA) systems is not being evaluated adequately to allow the utilities to determine the behaviour of the networks.

Now, Project Neptune, a venture between Yorkshire Water, United Utilities, ABB, the EPSRC and academics at seven UK universities, has developed an integrated decision-support system that can analyse the data generated by such sensors, allowing water operators to prioritise, detect, isolate and mitigate the consequences of failures in the water network more efficiently.