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With 500,000 pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes (PCCP) running some 4,000 kilometres through the Sahara Desert, the Great Man Made River Project is the largest PCCP project in the world.
But monitoring a pipeline that will eventually carry six million cubic metres of water per day from well fields deep in the Sahara to population centres on Libya's northern coast has been the job of Calgarybased Pure Technologies for the past decade.
Using its SoundPrint acoustic fibre optic (AFO) system, Pure Technologies monitors the nearly $20 billion pipeline for deterioration, allowing the Great Man Made River Authority (GMMRA) to take preventative measures before a section of the pipeline fails.
Mike Wrigglesworth, Pure Technologies vice-president for Europe and Africa, explained that the prestressed wires in the project's fourmeter-diameter concrete piping corrode over time and break, which is exactly what his monitoring equipment listens for.
"When the wires break, they release an acoustic energy that goes into the water column itself and that acoustic sound is recorded by our sensors in the pipeline," he said.
"Our job is to basically detect when...