Digitalization of the urban communities: energy harvesting from water pipeline to enhance leakage monitoring and detection

The SMART PIPING project aims to design, create and test innovative solutions for resilience of water and energy networks, aiming to develop technologies for the energy autonomy of stations monitoring of infrastructures suitable for the transport of fluids (natural gas and biogas, hydrocarbons, water). In this paper, an innovative bladeless turbine is designed and manufactured in relevant environment to demonstrate the feasibility of harvesting significant amount of energy in the urban pipeline distribution network to power local devices to monitor the piping health and enable leakage early-warning. Results show that bladeless turbine can constitute a cost-effective and highly reliable device to enable the digital and energy-efficient transition of urban communities.