High-Tech Cures For Water Shortages

Growing populations are straining supplies in parched areas of the U.S. Southwest, the Middle East and Australia, forcing governments to come up with costly solutions or face the risk of shortages. Other regions have plenty of water but lose billions of gallons a day because of an aging infrastructure prone to leaks and catastrophic failure.

Enter technology.

While there's no single miracle cure for water shortages, a host of innovative technologies already are making headway, or promise to do so in the near future. Sophisticated software can quickly spot leaky pipes, for instance, while new filters can more efficiently draw fresh water from the sea or clean wastewater, using everything from microscopic tubes to proteins found in living cells.

Here's a look at some of the ideas that are being adopted or are on the horizon.


Plugging Leaks
Cities in the developed world have been delivering clean, safe water for more than a century. And that's the problem: The infrastructure is old—in many cases, past the end of its useful life. A 2009 report found that U.S. water systems lose seven billion gallons of treated drinking water every day, enough to meet the average daily needs of 20 million households.

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Instituform Technologies Inc.

A crew installing a liner to fix leaky pipes.
.Stopping these leaks first means finding them. Utilities have monitoring systems, but the data must be downloaded from sensors that listen for leaks in the field and then analyzed. One way to simplify the job: sensors and software that analyze acoustic signals to more accurately locate leaks. These sensors don't monitor the pipes constantly, but they let utilities conduct regular surveys to look for problems.

One company, Echologics Engineering Inc., based in Toronto, uses sensors that are placed on water hydrants or other above-ground fixtures and can determine within a few inches the location of a leak between the sensors; they can also recognize leaks that occur outside the length of pipe being tested.

Another solution, software from Israel-based TaKaDu, analyzes data from a utility's existing industrial-control systems, using sophisticated algorithms and statistical models to spot anomalies. Although the software can't pinpoint the location of a leak