Yorkshire partnership to tackle water leakage in region’s major towns and cities

Yorkshire Water will partner with Hydraulic Analysis and Morrisons Water Services as part of a programme to deliver a £28 million investment to help meet its target of halving leakage by 2050.

The three companies will use innovative leakage detection technology to target 20 hotspot areas, that have been historically difficult to identify and rectify leakage. Most of the hotspot areas are based in city centres and large towns, where many large customers, traffic noise and complex supply arrangements make the resolution of background noise, consumption, and leakage detection difficult.

The trial hopes to save 1.7 million litres of water from leaking out of the water network every day. The solution will use flow meters, pressure sensors sampling at a high frequency and acoustic loggers. It will be underpinned by the Hydraulic Analysis digital twin, which uses near real time data to drive a hydraulic model of the Yorkshire Water network. The analytics system will identify network performance issues and enable the teams to quickly resolve them.

Adam Smith, manager of smart networks and metering transformation at Yorkshire Water, said: “This project has the potential to fundamentally change the level of service and reduce leakage in some of our most challenging areas of the network. The technology we will deploy in this project helps us to reduce costs, whilst saving carbon and delivering our key objectives.”

Lee Wood, contract director at Morrison Water Services, said: “As the exclusive supplier of this progressive technology to the UK’s water industry, we are confident we will revolutionise the way Yorkshire Water manage leakage and network performance, minimising disruption on the network and keeping water flowing to customers’ homes and businesses across the Yorkshire Water region. Our use of this innovative digital technology has proven to be cost and time effective. Predicting leakages and bursts means fewer emergency excavations and more proactive action to tackle leakage in ways which are good for reducing costs, saving carbon, and delivering better outcomes for the people of Yorkshire.”

Glyn Addicott, operations director at Hydraulic Analysis, said: “We are delighted to be working with Yorkshire Water in delivering an industry leading Digital Twin. We will reduce leakage and improve asset performance by monitoring critical supply areas in Yorkshire using live hydraulic models driven by pressure, flow, and acoustic data. Our pipeline simulation software, VariSim, is deployed on water networks and trunk mains around the world and we look forward to implementing our proven solution in the UK in this groundbreaking contract.”

For more information about Yorkshire Water’s other projects, go to: https://www.yorkshirewater.com/about-us/innovation/