Water Line Leak Locating

ACER’s state of the art Sewerin SeCorrPhon AC 200 system allows ACER to confidently locate leaks in water pipes regardless of the ambient conditions. The water escaping from the leak causes the material in the pipeline to vibrate. These vibrations travel along the pipe and can be picked up as structure-borne noise, even at distant contact points, for example fittings. The vibrations also travel through the ground up to the earth’s surface as ground-borne noise, albeit heavily muted. The SeCorrPhon system makes the vibrations audible to the human ear and also records and displays the volume and frequency spectrum as a graph.

Locating Underground Water Lines and Leaks

Locating Underground Plastic Water Lines

The SeCorrPhon AC 200 system combines pre-locating, pinpointing, and correlation processes in one system for ease of use and fast locating of a leak in the water system. Pre-locating a leak is done by measuring the noise intensity of the leak by evaluating the noise intensity on fittings along the pipeline, allowing our technician to hone in on the suspected area of the leak. Once the general area of the leak is identified, the leak is then pinpointed by measuring the acoustic signal and the visual display of the intensity to identify the area of maximum acoustical intensity. ACER can then utilize the correlator to measure the noise at two fittings surrounding the suspected leak area. Highly-sensitive microphones record the noises on the fittings; radio transmitters transmit the signals to a receiver – the correlator, which then determines the run time difference, i.e. the time lag between the noises reaching the two measuring points. The correlator calculates the exact leak position using the entered pipeline length, the pipe material and diameter. The leak is then located with sufficient accuracy to allow confident excavation.