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Patchflow-Robotics for In-Pipe Leak Repair

The frequency of droughts has increased by nearly a third globally since 2000. A UN report states that 75% of the world could face drought by 2050, and 5.7 billion people could live in areas with water shortages for a month or more every year. Water scarcity due to climate change alone will necessitate a reduction in leakage.

London was chosen as the location of focus for this project, as it has one of the earliest piped water distribution systems in the world. With more than half of pipes in London over 100 years old and made of corrosion-prone cast iron. This makes London an ideal candidate for the proposed system as it represents a well-developed city where the water leak issues are already the most advanced.

The majority of R&D occurring within the UK’s potable water industry revolves around the detection and location of leaks even though this only accounts for 20 percent of the repair process’s cost. Most of this cost in repair is associated with the shutting down of busy travel routes. The product's USP is its non-disruptive nature, meaning that the water companies can negate the need to pay expensive council charges associated with closing roads.

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    Transcript

    00:00:10 it's working yeah ready you ready to click should I click M okay great so hey everyone uh we are here today to just talk to you about patch flow and that's the future of pipe repair um we came to this idea after conducting a number of future scoping sessions where we looked at today's Trends and then took those fourward 20

    00:00:32 years to see what kind of world we could be living in at that time we started with trends that were very specific to a certain area but also kept in mind larger trends that affect the whole world and so our specific Trend our so-called signal was the fact that it's increasingly difficult to repair and maintain underground infrastructure such as electricity and gas lines um and this

    00:00:53 is because of increased urbanization and the proliferation of fiberoptic cables that are also underground making it more uh densely populated there underground um and we wanted to combine this with the idea of climate change um that will affect the entire world as we all know it um we initially so we initially wanted to create a system that would allow for a unified uh integration of

    00:01:14 underground infrastructure so that all the systems could be repaired together more efficiently but we realized that this was far too far too costly in terms of retrofitting existing systems so as such then we decided to move on to a system that would allow um for use incurrence and INF structure and then water networks were deemed to be an ideal place to start because um of how

    00:01:36 impacted water will be by the future of climate change and so to give an example a more specific example the leakage Problem in London is absolutely huge T's water and that's London's main drinking water supplier leaks 693 million liters of water each day and that's 8 million bathtubs worth for a population of 9 million people this is in large part due

    00:01:58 to aging infrastructure much of which is still from the victor in times with pipes that are over 100 years old the second issue is the economic perspective each leak uh that is requires to be fixed requires approval from the council for roads to be closed um 3 to 5 days of hard manual labor from teams and intense work this will average the cost of a leak repair to around $3,000 £3,000 then

    00:02:22 according to a leakage expert from W water as well only the most disruptive leaks are actually able to be fixed because a lot of the smaller leaks there's just not enough manpower to be fixing those and of course this issue is not isolated to London and in the US there is an average of 6 billion gallons of water about each day that's lost due to leaks throughout the water Network so

    00:02:40 this is certainly a global issue and then of course climate change we want to come back to and that's going to be a huge impact on water accessibility in urban areas and in future increased uh drought frequenc drought frequency will make water leakage a more acute problem as Supply becomes lower and at the same time these extreme temperature fluctu uations will

    00:03:00 result in the soil that surrounds the water uh surrounds the pipes increasing uh fluctuating in size um and this will increase the load on the pipes and crack the pipes more often leading to more leakage which we already saw in London in this uh summer of 2022 um and this combined simply with the networks getting older as they're not repaired will lead to a 10 an

    00:03:21 estimated 10 to 15 decrease percentage decreasing the amount of water available in England and at the same time while water is getting harder to come by um we also expect Rising urban populations to increase the demand on the network for example North London alone is expected to require an extra 265 million lers of water for its increased population by per day by the year

    00:03:45 2045 okay so yeah as Owen said we chose TS water and the primary reason we chose them is because they've got the largest distribution Network made up of cast iron pipes over 150 years old and this becomes really prevalent when you're talking about degradation to these pipes as pass this age you sort of get lots of leaks among this now Innovation is fored upon temp Water by governmental bodies

    00:04:07 like offat and defra and this Innovation can be sort of semed into three different sections the first is providing clean and uncontaminated drinking water the second is avoiding interruptions that are greater than 3 hours and the final one is to cut leakage by half by 2050 so how attemps to try to approach this the main method of minute is to prolong asset Lifetime

    00:04:28 by implenting polyethylene sleeve into their pipes and these are great because they're resistant to The Familiar forms of corrosion that cause pipe cast iron pipes to Decay and so with that structural inte from cast iron while still remaining sort of corrosion resistance to the to chloride ions that cause corrosion in it so then this is okay but the problems because the water

    00:04:48 industry is such low margins it means that they only manag to get at most a 1.8% turnover perom whereas the realistic the real figure is much closer to around half% which means they're looking to replace the entire networ a stage of an extra 200 years which isn't a viable solution at the minute they need to roll this out faster some more which needs to be done another area

    00:05:07 which they're looking at is trying to implement sort of predictive and prescriptive models to model the pressure and transience flow within the network and this is good because it's actually reduced leakage by 10.7% between 2022 and 2023 which is really effective however they're still losing huge amounts of water and they' been find an excess of 120 million P by offat

    00:05:28 for not um achieving the targets for leakage reduction so what they actually doing about it so current research mainly focuses on like leak location and identification and find leak within the network and this is useful however actually only accounts around 20% of the cost of repair 80% is actually in the repair itself so this is where we thought we'd have be able to bring some

    00:05:49 impact and some Innovation to the network uh so we're introducing patch flow so patch flow is a semi-autonomous invasive robotic solution that can enter the PIP stream stream and passively flow Downstream and expand and apply composite patches to leaks leaks and from there this means if you attack if you attack the minor leaks initially it stops and prevents them from becoming

    00:06:12 larger leaks which both prevents leakage currently and in the future so it works in two fronts of TS water so take a look at our process so the first step is for a technician to approach an access point where they'll insert the device into the stream where it will start to flow Downstream once once it's reached its predefined rough location described by the

    00:06:33 prescriptive model we were talking about earlier it will expand its initial anchor followed by a secondary anle which isolates the crack location and once this is isolated it infills it with a resin composite and then after that it then flushes the entire inter flushes the entire crack with soft robotic actuation which then forces any debris through the crack out and also forces

    00:06:55 the resin composite into the crack itself and this is really useful because it also limits the air surface area of the composite material to the water which is really important for reducing mitigating the risk of contamination which is one of the most important features for Def and finally the once cured the robotic detaches from anchor detached and it flows Downstream to uh a

    00:07:16 trap where where it's extracted at another access point by technician great so yeah in terms of the economic impact then so very recently in the news in the UK there's been a lot of controversy about raw sewage leakage into the country's Waterway and because of this the water companies have asked for an additional expenditure of uh doubling their expenditure to 96

    00:07:37 billion in the period from 2025 to 2030 and this will be to fix sewage leakage uh drinking water leakage and to increase capacity by adding new reservoirs um but this is obviously controversial as the uh bill in the end will be footed by the consumer of the water um just everyday people will have to pay on average an extra 156 pounds on their water bill per year and so the

    00:08:00 responsibility of the uh for the economic aspects of the network is covered by ofwat who regulates this and they're the ones that are responsible for setting leakage targets um but they have to make sure that these remain reasonable and sort of uh don't increase the cost of water bills too heavily so um and this phenomenon is known as the sustainable economic level of leakage so

    00:08:20 for example if you wanted to fix leakage entirely you could dig up all the pipes in London and replace them all but then people would be paying tens of thousands of pounds on their water bill which is just not possible in the current economic climate of course um and then this means it for us that decreasing the cost of leak repair does not decrease the overall Market size because we're

    00:08:39 not limited by the cost or the amount of money we're limited simply by the number of leaks we can fix economically um and in terms an interesting stat in terms of boots on the ground doing the actual work um for T's water there are only currently 240 leakage repair teams that serve the entirety of the network so that's over 9 million people served by only 480 million people responsible for

    00:09:01 uh locating and fixing all the leaks and uh so we need to improve these teams efficiency um and to do that this is why our system was invented and then even further in the future our system could possibly be even more autonomous and even uh completely autonomous to even further increase the number of leakages that can be repaired

    00:09:22 sorry and so what we're doing now this obviously a very futurist idea very far in the future so what we're doing now our upcoming development is we're looking into uh focusing our masters projects on this area and so I personally will be looking at um this one on the left automating soft robot Creation with smart casting as I think that soft robots will definitely be a

    00:09:40 big part of the future and of course definitely in uh water networks where you don't want to be damaging the pipes so in addition I also have a smaller project looking at um how we might be able to infer information about pipe lifetime from vibration data that's fed down the cast IR pipes and a larger project I also have is to do with our sort of First Development stage which is

    00:09:58 inserting a test he device into the pipeline and then letting it expand and leave like a shell behind for a repair and and then being extracted from the same entry point uh so the main vision of our system is to have water be seen as the valuable Source it will be and for to be realize can take a while and lots Innovation from different sectors within the water and we feel like we're

    00:10:20 going to be able to be in that transition stage from this sort of traditional old unintuitive Network we have to this smart Network in the future which hopefully enable us to remain SEC have a secure water supply in the future even when there's less supply of it in the environment thank you for your time