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
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 28 2020, @01:42PM (2 children)
You mean, you don't have to lick the ground in a grid pattern anymore? That is welcome news. The ground around the Port Authority [wikipedia.org] is...icky.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday February 28 2020, @04:54PM (1 child)
Perhaps an even better way would be radioisotope trackers. They could use something rather short-lived so as not to contaminate the environment too much. Maybe even just a beta emitter or something weak. :P
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 28 2020, @08:47PM
...and thus in the year 2020 Nuka Quantum was born. The world would never be the same...
Washington DC delenda est.