The design of the housing for leak detection device

Abstract

Small leaks in pipes cause huge losses of water, wasting the energy and money put into cleaning the water and pumping it to the point of the leak. Detecting these small leaks is currently not very accurate or practical to do over an entire system of pipes. A device is being developed which detects leaks from within the pipe using the drop in pressure at the point of a leak. This thesis addresses the geometric needs for deploying the sensors in the pipe. The housing for the device needs to navigate pipes while keeping the sensors close enough to the wall to get a good reading. The housing is made up of a frame with flexible cantilevers which sensor holders pivot about to stay flush with the wall. After looking at other devices which navigate pipes, the geometric constraints of the pipe were used to create an initial design. The first iteration was manufactured to check for validity of the design. Many changes have to be made to the design based on the results from manufacturing the first iteration.