WADI - Water-tightness DetectIon Implementation

  • Dates: October 2016 – March 2020
  • Project web: http://www.waditech.eu/
  • Leader: SGI STUDIO GALLI INGEGNERIA
  • Grant agreement number: 689239
  • Financed by

     

DESCRIPTION

Water losses have a high environmental impact in terms of natural resources depletion (water, energy, ecosystems) but also directly affect people and the economy, e.g. through resulting contamination of water transportation systems, higher cost of water, service disruptions and conflicts over scarce resource among water users.

The WADI proposal addresses the Horizon 2020 challenge of building water and energy efficient and climate change resilient society by developing an innovative concept of coupling and optimizing off-the-shelf remote sensing devices to detect water leaks in transmission systems out of urban areas and considering the integration of a general, credible, reliable and scalable concept of the ecosystem services valuation in the water sector.

OBJETIVES

WADI’s overall objective is to contribute to the reduction of losses in water transmission systems for water supply, irrigation, and hydropower, and simultaneously, to decrease the related energy consumption required in the process and help utilities in providing services more cost-effectively.

In particular, the project aims to develop an innovative airborne water leak detection surveillance service to provide water utilities with adequate information on leaks in water infrastructure outside urban areas (rural areas) and optimise their related performance in this field. This will be done through innovative optical remote sensing (using multispectral and infrared cameras already available in the market) and their application on two complementary aerial platforms, i.e. manned and unmanned, in an operational environment represented by two pilot sites, i.e. in Spain (Palma de Mallorca), case of water supply mains; and Portugal (Alqueva) case of multi-purpose mains serving irrigation, water supply, and hydropower.

CIRCE´s ROLE

CIRCE will lead:

  • The Analysis of results and societal benefits
  • The environmental and economic characterization “from the cradle to the grave” of the new WADI leak detection method, carrying out LCA and LCC of the whole system
  • The analysis of the water-related Ecosystems affected by WADI’s innovation

PARTNERS