PIPEGUARD - A novel technology for sewerage mapping, inspection and cleaning with integrated real-time self-audit capability

Sewage systems are crucial to reduce the risks of water borne diseases and avoid flooding of cities. Cleaning processes are thus highly important to avoid health risks and environmental, economic and societal impacts which can be caused by damaged or blocked sewerage. Sewer networks must therefore not only be kept clean, they also have to be continuously inspected in order to detect structural damages, pipe deterioration and construction failures in order to avoid local city floods, backflow into basements, traffic disturbances, street and surface erosion, and pollution of ground water and local receiving waters. Hence, if the sewerage is damaged or blocked, there is a significant environmental, social and public health risk. During the cleaning process, high amounts of water are used to clean the pipes regardless of the real cleaning demands. Hence, there is a high need to develop a system integrating a reliable inspection tool which efficiently varies the cleaning process according to the real demand. The PIPEGUARD system is about the development of an all in one system for the maintenance of pipes and sewage systems. It can detect the degree of pollution and damages in sewage pipes with ultrasound and clean them only if necessary. The geographic location of the pipe will be also mapped in real-time via an inertial navigation system to allocate detected damages to their position and to obtain reliable position mapping for the creation of 3D network maps. This will lead into an advanced sewer cleaning management and contributing to an improvement of its overall state, as a result of modifying the periodicity of cleaning and optimizing maintenance costs depending on network characteristics and needs.