CIPPS 2.0 – Next-Generation IoT Infrastructure Monitoring

Water pipelines globally are ageing assets and, in the majority of cases, in a state of deterioration. As it is difficult to monitor buried, complex assets such as pipes, utilities have little information about the health status of the pipe; this lack of knowledge leads to pipeline failure and water losses.

The Critical Infrastructure Pipeline Protection System (CIPPS) provides data-driven forecasts of remaining asset lifetimes and predicts pipeline failure, helping our customers prioritise repairs and extend the lifetime of their asset base by replacing only pipework that is coming to the end of its useful life. CIPPS monitors a metric never gathered before in water pipeline monitoring: strain.

Its sensors attach directly to the pipe wall, collect data pertaining to actual structural health and send it to a data acquisition system, from which it is transmitted to self-learning, cloud-based algorithms predicting pipeline health. CIPPS is available as a retrofit solution for existing pipelines as well as an embedded system for new build pipelines, allowing utility companies to assess the health status of their entire network with one unified solution.

Bringing together the latest developments in cloud-based AI, hydroinformatics, sensor technology and wireless communications, we have significantly advanced the current state-of-the-art and will help utility companies bring down network distribution losses by an estimated 50%. The UK currently loses ca. 2,954m litres of water each day (discoverwater.org, 2020).

We have developed CIPPS Retrofit to TRL7 and deployed it on multiple pipelines including a main serving 30,000 customers and a hospital, owned by the UK's largest listed water company, United Utilities Group plc. All sites are fully operational and transmit data as planned with good accuracy and reliability. Having successfully demonstrated the feasibility of our approach, our aim is to now improve overall system reliability and implement CIPPS across water networks to improve utilities' ability to keep their networks operational for their customers.

In preparation for this commercial roll-out on a larger scale we need to improve the performance of the prototypes used in the pilot installations. We plan to use the Innovation Continuity Loan to complete an innovation project (CIPPS 2.0), which will enable the maintenance-free operation of our sensors in the field for the first time and re-design sensor data processing using the latest advancements in electronics, telemetry and artificial intelligence.