Engineers to map the ‘underworld’

Thu, 6 October 2005

ENGINEERS AT the UK’s University of Birmingham are aiming to put paid to unnecessary disruption caused by utility companies when they dig up roads and pavements, by developing techniques to locate and map all of the cables and pipes buried beneath them. This information can then be shared by these companies in order to streamline street works.

There are currently over 4 million kilometres of underground cables and pipes in the UK – a combination of water, sewer, gas, electricity, telecommunications and drainage – and it is estimated that there are 1.5 million holes dug each year on UK highways and footpaths by utility companies so that they can install new services and maintain existing ones. Every time a company digs a hole in a road there is a risk of damage to another utility's buried services, and workers are also exposed to the danger of striking live power cables. This risk is much higher if a digger does not know what lies beneath the surface and precisely where it is located. The disruption caused by these street works ranges from stress to car drivers, traffic jams and diversions onto roads that are not made for heavy traffic. Many of today's buried assets were laid in Victorian times when the need to record accurate details of location and depth was not a priority. Even if such records were made, the reference points for measurements will probably have been lost: kerb lines have probably moved, and buildings might well have been knocked down and replaced. Since then, many more pipes and cables have been laid and now records occur in many different formats including paper, microfiche, and digital, but very few of these are compatible as there has never been a single common standard for this data. Professor Chris Rogers, from Birmingham University's Department of Civil Engineering, and project leader, says, "Utility companies are driven by customer demand for the essential services of water, sewerage, gas, electricity, and telecommunications, and there is now increasing pressure on them to provide cable TV, internet, and broadband access. We hope that by providing these companies with the means to create a comprehensive map before they dig, that they will be able to carry out their work more efficiently and safely. Parallel research at other universities is seeking to find a common platform for data sharing so that utility companies can cooperate with each other effectively when planning street works so as to cause less disruption to the public." Current figures suggest that the utility industry's annual direct construction costs associated with street works is currently £1.5 billion, with third-party damage costs at around £150 million. The societal costs such as delays to road users, environmental damage, disruption of businesses and air pollution may be as high as £5.5 billion a year. Work is already underway on a separate project at the University of Birmingham's Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering into new technologies that will make the location and identification of buried assets easier. Researchers are developing micro-sensors that can be embedded into the pipes at the manufacturing stage. These sensors can be located by electronic signal from a few metres away and will hold information about the condition of the pipe or cable so that preventative maintenance can take place. This two-pronged attack on the problem will therefore seek to create smart location techniques and 'smart pipes' that will tell us where they are. The mapping project, which combines different disciplines across 7 universities, is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for just over £1.2 million. There will be five workshops focussing on topics such as sensors, mapping technologies and condition assessment. These are aimed at utility companies, global satellite positioning companies and other stakeholders. Other partners in this project are the Universities of Bath, Leeds, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, and Southampton.