A pipe dream for UCI researcher

Pai Chou, a computer engineering professor at UC Irvine, is on the verge of planting sensors on water and waste pipes around Newport Beach. The end product of his research could change the way local agencies identify breaks, blockages and leaks in their pipes and help them respond to problems before they become catastrophes.

Chou has chosen an area between the Upper Newport Bay and Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian for his study.

After working through some logistics with the Orange County Sanitation District, he and his partners will attach devices to the pipes that measure vibrations.

Certain vibrational patterns, for instance, can tell researchers if the pressure in a pipe has changed abruptly, signaling a rupture.

As a computer engineer, Chou is primarily interested in designing an efficient and effective sensor system.

“The goal here is not just to make something that works, but that can be mass produced at a reasonable cost. We hope that our advances in the research area turn out to be useful to the agencies that run the water systems,” Chou said.

Without remote sensing devices, agencies that maintain pipes often have to send workers out to the location of a suspected problem to check it out. The response time is also slower because the consequences of the problem have to be significant enough for someone to notice it.

Chou hopes to deploy most of the test sensors by the end of the year. With any luck, the technology could be put to work on a larger scale in two or three years, Chou said.

— Alan Blank