Sensors detect pipe faults

Engineers at UC Irvine plan to outfit their local water system with sensors that will alert officials when and where pipes crack or break thanks to a $5.7m (£3.5m) grant from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and several local water groups.

About 240,000 water-main breaks occur per year in the US according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and water system failures are estimated to waste up to 6bn gallons of drinking water every day.

Masanobu Shinozuka, lead project investigator and civil and environmental engineering chair, and Pai Chou, an electrical engineering and computer science associate professor, created the compact sensing devices that attach to the surface of pressurised (drinking water) and non-pressurised (wastewater) pipes.

They will detect vibration and sound changes that could indicate pipe problems. Through antennae, the sensors will relay information wirelessly over long distances to a central location for recording, processing and analysis.

Initially, the sensor network will cover about one square mile of the local water system; eventually, it could encompass more than 10 square miles, the largest of its kind to date.