Pipe failures can lead to significant water loss and customer service disruptions, often bringing emergency crews out in the middle of the night. Pipes that still have plenty of useful life are often replaced, draining funds that could have been used elsewhere in your utility.

That doesn’t jive when managers and engineers are required to create effective operating and capital-planning programs that will result in lower nonrevenue water loss, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced worker safety, while keeping the budget in check. That’s why PipeRank technology makes sense as an affordable solution to providing accurate pipe failure estimates for justifying investment plans and rate cases. In essence, it enables water utilities to see pipe failures before they happen. 

The PipeRank technology, powered by VODA.ai and delivered by Echologics, a Mueller brand, is designed to predict future failures more accurately than age-based estimates or the prior failure models that are used today.

“Aging infrastructure continues to present challenges to cities around the world,” says Chad Mize, senior vice president, sales and marketing at Mueller. “Mueller is focused on developing and delivering advanced data-driven solutions to help water utilities address these challenges, leveraging technology that enables them to make critical operational decisions.”

The PipeRank technology identifies pipe segments that are likely to fail in the future and assigns a corresponding business risk score. A condition assessment is then performed on the pipelines using Echologics ePulse technology to diagnose specific problems. This condition assessment makes it easy for utilities to plan operating and engineering programs by tailoring their course of action, and focusing capital expenditures and resources on the highest-risk assets. The system can produce business risk profiles for one to 20 years, helping utilities reduce pipe failures, nonrevenue water and premature pipe renewal.

“Current industry best practice is to leverage as much desktop data as possible to identify trends and generate data-supported decisions for failure planning and capital deployment,” says Eric Stacey, vice president and general manager of Echologics. “The PipeRank technology pairs available pipe degradation factors with a proprietary machine learning model to prioritize every pipe segment analyzed by likelihood and consequence of failure.” 800-423-1323; www.echologics.com.