Background

Many water distribution systems in this country are almost 100 years old. About 26 percent of piping in these systems are made of unlined cast iron or steel and are in poor condition. Many methods that locate leaks in these pipes are time-consuming, costly, disruptive to operations, and unreliable in finding small leaks. This case study presents the results of research conducted at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency s Urban Watershed Research Facility in Edison, New Jersey. The project sought ways to use acoustic technology to pinpoint leaks as small as 0.1 gph (0.1 mL/s) in petroleum pipelines, a regulatory requirement for those lines. Because all experiments were conducted using water and on pipelines of size and material similar to those found in many water distribution systems, results also apply to these pipelines. Although leaks of 0.1 gph (0.1 mL/s) are unusually small to search for in water distribution systems, researchers were able to locate small leaks within 1 ft (0.3 m), which is compatible to the best practice of commercially available leak pinpointing technology for water distribution systems.

Numerous aging drinking water systems have difficulty complying with the increasingly stringent requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which indicates that...