Tagging and Sensing Buried Assets - Isis Project No 3650 & 3666

Smart resonant tags and sensors that are efficient, cheap, robust, and require low maintenance for enhancing the visibility of buried assets such as utilities and labelling them with unique ID.

Marketing Opportunity

The total length of buried pipes and cables in the UK is about 4 million km. The HSE has identified about 100,000 km of cast iron gas main in the UK that are regarded as being at risk of failure. These necessary replacements for iron gas pipes will be replaced at a rate of about 3000 km per year until the entire network has been replaced in about 2030. Furthermore, the market is growing rapidly especially in Asia.

The Oxford Invention

The HSE (Health Safety and Executive Enforcement Policy) for Replacement of Iron Gas mains 2006 has developed legally binding requirements on the UK gas distribution network operators for the replacement of ageing cast iron gas mains with plastic ones.  However, current methods used to trace these plastic based pipes are either inefficient or very expensive and this hampers their replacement and repair operations.

The Oxford approach is primarily concerned with integrating a low cost resonant tag into the buried assets to enhance their visibility when surveyed using ground probing radar. These passive devices provide a unique ID code, which can be used to identify the nature of the buried utility including water, gas, power, telecommunications and other services (see Figure 1). Variants of these tags have applications in environmental sensing and civil engineering enabling detection of leaks, chemicals, and can also be used to monitor the health of the buried assets.

Figure 1: Oxford devices can be used to colour code the buried assets assigning them a unique ID

The Oxford invention offers the following advantages:

• It is cheap, robust, efficient and requires low maintenance
• It can be attached to the existing network of pipes
• It is compatible with conventional GPR equipment used for detection
• It can be integrated in the pipes at the manufacturing stage

Patent Status

This work is the subject of two UK patent applications, and Isis would like to talk to companies or investors interested in commercialising this opportunity. Please contact the Isis Project Manager to discuss this further.

Request Further Information: Project Number 3650 & 3666 - Tagging and Sensing Buried Assets