Yorkshire Water and partners enlist "proven" digital tech to tackle leakage in towns and cities

TECHNOLOGY UPDATE

Yorkshire Water, along with supply chain partners, has started a trial of digital monitoring technology to reduce leakage in cities and towns in its area y 1.7Ml a day.

The trial is part of a £28 million investment to help the water firm to meet its target of halving leakage by 2050. Yorkshire Water along with engineering company Hydraulic Analysis and design and construction firm, Morrisons Water Services, have said they will target 20 “hotspot areas” where it has proved difficult to identify and rectify leakage. Most of those areas are in city centres and large towns, where “large customers, traffic noise and complex supply arrangements make the resolution of background noise, consumption, and leakage detection difficult,” the company said.

The trial will deploy a digital twin – a near real-time data-driven emulation of the Yorkshire Water network – drawing on flow meters, pressure sensors sampling at a high frequency and acoustic loggers. The Hydraulic Analysis technology will be provided by Morrisons Water Services as its exclusive supplier.

The digital twin will identify network performance issues and, potentially “fundamentally change the level of service and reduce leakage in some of our most challenging areas of the network,” according to manager of smart networks and metering transformation at Yorkshire Water, Adam Smith.

Operations director at Hydraulic Analysis, Glyn Addicott, said its “proven” simulation software, has been “deployed on water networks and trunk mains around the world.”