Robotic systems for water pipe inspection do not generally include navigation components for mapping the pipe network and locating damage. Such navigation systems would be highly advantageous for water companies because it would allow them to more effectively target maintenance and reduce costs. In water pipes, a major challenge for robot navigation is feature sparsity. In order to address this...

We report a wicking material based on nanostructured TiO2 (NST) for the application of flat heat pipes. Heat pipes adopt wicking materials to achieve some unique functions that thermal siphons could not achieve[1], and they have found their applications as cooling systems in a wide variety of areas such as spacecraft and electronics. Different kinds of materials such as carbon nanotubes[2], nan...

Water loss through leaking pipes constitutes a major challenge to the operational service of water utilities. In recent years, increasing concern about the financial loss and environmental pollution caused by leaking pipes has been driving the development of efficient algorithms for detecting leakage in water piping networks. Water distribution networks (WDNs) are disperse in nature with numero...

Active cooling technologies such as heat pipes, loop heat pipes (LHPs), thermosyphons, loop thermosyphons (LTSs), and pumped singleor two-phase coolant loops require specialized modeling treatment. However, these 1D ducted systems are largely overlooked in 3D thermal modeling tools. The increasing popularity of CFD and FEM models and generation of analysis data from 3D CAD data are strong trend...

This paper considers the problem of internally inspecting underground pipes, such as sewers, in order to identify and locate major structural defects or damage to the pipes, and to identify potential defects which may lead to failure. It considers three aspects of the pipe inspection task; namely, the extraction of geometric primitives from the pipe image sequences, the tracking of these primit...

Vibration fatigue failure is a critical problem of hydraulic pipes under severe working conditions. Strain modal testing of small and light pipes is a good option for dynamic characteristic evaluation, structural health monitoring and damage identification. Unique features such as small size, light weight, and high multiplexing capability enable Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors to measure stru...