This challenge is part of the larger hackathon: Advanced technology & Industrial innovation (high tech systems & engineering, chemicals & materials, energy transition).
More and more households are disconnecting from natural gas. The demand for removing gas connections will therefore increase significantly from around 40,000 per year now to 320,000 in 2033. This threatens to create a capacity shortage for the contractors who carry out these jobs for the grid operators.
In the current process of removing the gas connection, the biggest bottleneck is locating the point where the house connection line branches off from the main line. This has to be sealed there, after which the house connection line also has to be removed from the ground.
On average, locating the point where to dig takes around 2 hours of the standard time of 4 hours per job. This is because sometimes there are no drawings available or because they are no longer accurate of the location of the house connection line. This also makes predicting the duration of the job and therefore the planning of it unnecessarily complex. In addition, every excavation movement carries a risk of damaging other underground infrastructure with the resulting damage and further delays to the planning and unexpected interruption of the service.
This is why we are developing the Imbema Smart Pipe Mapper. This system consists of a probe tip with an IMU that is run through the gas pipe with a fish tape. The IMU measures the movement and combined with the data from an encoder on the fish tape, a 3D model of the travelled route is created. This is where the challenge starts: you will get a 3D model out of the system, but now the 3D model has to be translated to an orientation in the real world and the result has to be presented to the gas mechanic, in such a way that he will be able to exactly determine where he should start digging to find the connection on the main gas pipe in the street.
The challenge is to define a few different ways to communicate to the gas mechanic the location and position of the pipeline in the ground.
A successful solution will dramatically reduce the time mechanics spend locating gas connections, improve planning accuracy, and minimize damage to other underground systems, all while increasing overall contractor efficiency.
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