Aquacheck: A Knowledge Transfer Partnership

There are many significant challenges facing the water industry, from the impact of climate change to a growing population, and environmental quality. Bamidele Adebisi, Professor of Intelligent Infrastructure Systems at Manchester Met, led an award-winning project to tackle water wastage, a major issue that costs water providers huge sums every year.

Over  three million litres of water are lost due to misuse and tampering every day - equivalent to 1,180 Olympic swimming pools. Much of this wastage is due to the antiquated infrastructure of our water system. Bamidele’s project, in collaboration with Aquacheck Engineering, has revolutionised one aspect of this infrastructure: the smart standpipe.

Standpipes allow water systems to be connected to hoses, for example if needed by fire fighters. However, unauthorised standpipes are sometimes used to steal water, which can cause low pressure, and lead to water discolouration. By taking this traditional tool and turning it into a smart, connected device, Bamidele has opened up new functionalities that may generate significant social and economic impact – beginning with identifying the sources of leaks.

Aquacheck Engineering are a technology firm based in Rochdale, who manufacture equipment for water utility and fire protection services. They identified a serious problem for water suppliers: individuals could abstract water from the company’s network undetected, without any financial implications. To identify where this theft was occurring within the network, Aquacheck needed to develop new technology. To solve this problem, they approached Manchester Met to create a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP).

KTPs help businesses in the UK to innovate and grow by linking them with an academic or research organisation, such as the University, and a graduate who is embedded in the company as a KTP Associate.

The collaboration relied on the University’s understanding of wireless communications, power management, and sensors to transform a traditional standpipe into a mobile Internet of Things (IoTs)-connected device using low-cost, modular, flexible and highly efficient components.

Bamidele had experience of smart meter technology, having worked as a Senior Researcher and work package leader on a project to develop meters for electricity providers. But it took an imaginative leap for him to see how this work could be applied to the water industry. ‘The first challenge was to change my perspective,’ he explained. ‘It was difficult to imagine how it would work. During the meeting, I started sketching, and I got a sense that there were many similarities in smart meter infrastructure for water and electricity. They both need to measure resource usage and transmit measurements to a remote server, for example. A key challenge with a standpipe, however, is that it is mobile, it needs a battery with long life and has to be portable, among other requirements. What we were planning to achieve was very similar. It was just finding solutions to these challenges.’

One of the major issues facing the project was the challenge of incorporating modern smart technology into the dated infrastructure of the water network. The network was built with the best technology available at the time: ‘What we were doing now wasn’t planned for – they weren’t developed with the sense that they would need to be improved or made smart,’ says Bamidele. ‘There were legacy issues – there are things that you can’t get rid of, like some of the old meters. The challenge was to make our new smart meters attach to the old ones’.

There is also the large cost associated with infrastructure development. Bamidele says, ‘We had to persuade them that we would be able to add value. Fortunately, Aquacheck didn’t need so much convincing - they already saw the gap in the market and the value of what we were doing.’

Once they had overcome these obstacles, it became clear that the new smart meters would offer unexpected benefits to the industry. The meters do more than simply measure the amount of water flowing through the system (although they still do this with 30% more accuracy than their analogue mechanical  predecessors). They can  also measure water pressure across the network, where people are tapping the network, and much more.  This is particularly true in cases such as  fire-fighting operations where momentary high water pressure (also referred to as Transient Surge (TS)) can lead to pipe burst, valve rupture and other adverse pipe capillary actions in the local distribution network. Unfortunately, this aspect is often overlooked if not forgotten. This information can be used to predict demand, find leakages, measure water quality and more. Over time, the meters will build up huge amounts of localised data which has many potential applications for public health and behavioural analysis.

The experience of working with Aquacheck has been particularly rewarding for Bamidele. Thinking about the benefits of collaborating with industry, he says: ‘Mixing academic and professional crowds brings diversity, and increases capacity – we expose each other to new ideas and ways of thinking. What is interesting about working with businesses is the sort of questions they ask. They don’t want to look at complex equations. They challenge you to work differently as an academic – they challenge you to think about what impact you will have, how you will help people. It helps you to go deeper in the way that you address challenges. It isn’t just for the joy we derive from our research, which is great, but also there is a product at the end of it.’

The impact on people’s lives is key for Bamidele: ‘Normally, in academia, you start research in your head, and then you get into the lab to test your theories. But what impact does that have on people’s lives? How do you make sure you are making a difference for them? This collaboration means we can create something people can touch. I can talk to my 15 year old, or my grandmother, and say to them ‘look at this, I made it’ – rather than asking them to read a research paper that they wouldn’t even understand.’ And the impact of this collaboration has been recognised at the KTP Best of the Best awards 2020.