ASTERRA Satellite Leak Detection in Portugal

BACKGROUND

Santarem is a city and municipality located in west-central Portugal. See Figure 1. It has a population of 59,000 people.

Empressa Aguas de Santarem is the potable water service provider delivering 16.449 m3 per day to 27.918 service connections through 1103 km of

distribution pipe.

Aguas de Santarem is currently one of the best-run systems in Portugal with a non-revenue water (NRW) level of 24%.

The goal is to reduce this to 15% in the next three years.

TECHNOLOGY

Aguas de Santarem retained ASTERRA to provide Recover satellite leak detection services.

Recover uses the unique capabilities of L-Band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to detect the signature of soil saturated with potable water underground.

The entire service area is surveyed and points of interest (POIs) or likely leak locations are identified.

The algorithm uses a patented process and propriety algorithm to identify those areas that have the highest concentration of leaks so that field leak crews can be deployed efficiently to pinpoint these leaks.

Only about 5%-10% of the total service area pipeline is identified to be field inspected.

An initial service was carried out in May 2022, where 550 linear km of the Aguas de Santarem supply network (about half of the total network) was analyzed.

BENCHMARK DATA

Typically, Aguas de Santarem uses two field crews to perform boots-on-the-ground leak pinpointing, one internal crew and one

external crew.

Table 1 represents leak detection performance for both crews, as well as a combined average.

The results of the internal team, who were retained for the pilot, are as follows: Before using ASTERRA, 2 internal employees found

about 0.6 leaks per day and 0.67 leaks per km surveyed.

RESULTS

The satellite image was taken at the end of May 2022 and the points of interest, following algorithmic analysis, were delivered in mid-June. The delivery of the service resulted in 141 points of interest for analysis by the field team.

The fieldwork to investigate the points of interest was carried out by the internal leak detection team over 35 days of work (1.8 km traveled per day).

The investigation results can be seen in Table 2 below. An analysis of these results reveals that the number of leaks found per km of the network surveyed almost quadrupled—0.67 leaks/km to 2.06 leaks/km—and tripled the number of leaks found in a month—25 to 77.

When comparing to the benchmark data, the internal Aguas de Santarem team without satellite technology finds 0.6 leaks per day, and with the technology this jumps to nearly 2 leaks detected daily.

This data suggests that the use of ASTERRA technology has significantly increased (4x) the effectiveness and productivity of leak detection field teams.

CONCLUSIONS

The ASTERRA Recover satellite service allowed Aguas de Santarem to focus their leak crews on areas where there is a higher density of leaks.

This increased leaks found per km inspected and leaks found per crew day (Table 2).

This results in water saved at a time when water scarcity is a growing concern, as well as cost saving to the utility which can maximize the effectiveness of their leak detection crews and reduce expenses on lost water.

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BENCHMARK DATA

RESULTS

CONCLUSIONS

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