Drone technology has been used as part of a £4.8 million project to replace a Yorkshire Water water treatment works with new clean water pipeline and two new pumping stations.

The company’s water treatment works in West Stonesdale needs to be replaced and the most effective solution is to replace it with a new clean water pipeline and two new pumping stations.

Yorkshire Water’s contractors, Morrison Utility Services (MUS) are carrying out the work and installing more than 20 km of new water pipe from Reeth to Angram, passing through Healaugh, Low Whita and Gunnerside.

Most of the pipe will be laid in private land and fields but there will be some road crossings, where traffic management will be used for safety reasons.

Unmanned Air Vehicles or drones were trialled by MUS whilst investigating the route of the new pipeline. Investigating private land can be a very time consuming process and the pipeline route presented the team with a number of engineering issues including four crossings of the River Swale and 13 crossings of other water courses, none of which could be viewed from with Google Earth or from the highways which were located too far away.

Mike West, MUS Construction Manager said:

“Drones have minimised the physical risks to our employees, allowed us to access unreachable locations at speed, and enabled us to take arial images, extract the terrain slope, aspect and ruggedness and see things in a range of ways. All of this was very useful when designing the new pipeline and we’ve seen enough from this trial to suggest drones can play an extremely beneficial role in future projects.”

MUS used Skyjib 2 Titanium UAVs during the project which includes the following features:

• A heavy lift Octocopter platform capable of flying for up to 25 minutes
• Capacity to fly up to 1km at a time from vertical lift off and up to 500m elevation
• Used mainly for aerial photography and videography work utilising a range of optical sensors
• Advanced vibration dampening for clear HD footage
• First Person View (FPV) camera mounted on the front feeds back live images and telemetry information (e.g. speed, altitude)
• Sensors mounted to the underside of the craft return a live feed back to the operator who has full control of the sensor and is able to position it independent of the movement of the UAV to capture points of interest.

The scheme will take around 12 months to complete but most of the pipe laying will be complete by October/November. The decommissioning of West Stonesdale water treatments works will take place in early 2016.