Water utilities commonly use acoustic loggers to monitor water loss caused by aging infrastructure, which is becoming an increasing problem for water utilities across the globe.

The monitoring is aimed at either detecting leaks before they become breaks, and enabling proactive management of pipe assets for longer, or the reduction of non-revenue water loss.

However, the large volumes of data collected by acoustic loggers presents a challenge. The data is often not specific about the type of leak detected or the priority which should be assigned to repair, and utility operations crews can become frustrated with false alarms.

The University of Adelaide partnered with a water utility to develop significantly more accurate analytics.

Through their Commercial Accelerator Scheme, the university aims to commercialise the analytics and offer it to other water utilities.

To get to market faster, the university engaged LAB³ to implement the analytics into an IoT data platform.

LAB³ SensorMine leverages Microsoft and Azure technology and is a ready-made and easily customised IoT data platform which can process, visualise, and present large amounts of data near on instantaneously, ready for practical use.

Clients benefit from dashboards that are easy to read on any screen by operational managers.

For the University of Adelaide, the solution provides a map view over the water pipe network in focus and shows the location and status of every acoustics logger.

There are leak alerts, maintenance alerts and communications alerts along with a number of analytic presentations to aid in leak characterisation and prioritisation.

The deployment of SensorMine has enabled the university to get to market faster, with the university well placed to offer their analytics to other water utilities across the globe.

The university was able to focus its time and resources on acoustics, hydraulic engineering and statistical and machine learning methods. And the university was able to move at least six months faster than the alternative options also explored.