Patent-Pending Tech May Help Prevent Hazardous Underground Utility Strikes

The Common Ground Alliance estimated in 2019 that the annual total social costs of underground infrastructure damage in the United States reached approximately $30 billion. With that in mind, Purdue University engineers have developed a patent-pending method to decrease hazardous strikes to underground utility pipes during construction projects.

Engineers are improving upon traditional ground-penetrating radar data to better estimate the location, orientation and radius of underground utility pipes with new technology that could lower related financial losses, service disruptions, injuries and fatalities. The research uses a Bayesian framework to quantify uncertainty in estimating underground pipe depth, horizontal position, orientation and radius, while also introducing diagnostic metrics to assess GPR data quality, including quantitative measures of completeness and consistency.

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