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Many cities and municipalities are built in areas that are susceptible to ground motions. Delta cities can be suffering from soft soil compaction or the effects of groundwater lowering. Mountainous cities can be threatened by landslides. And thus, managing these cities and the utilities that support it means that these motions have to be taken into account.
Using satellite data, we can efficiently measure and monitor the entire city or province for movements. With new data arriving on a weekly basis, there is ample opportunity to reduce costs of maintenance now and – by including insights in policy analysis – in the far future.
We realize that many involved in city or utilities management are not remote sensing or data scientists. Therefore, we not only provide the measurement data (with often millions of measurements) but we also produce maps, tables and similar information products that are easy to use in the software that you are already using, and that uses generally accepted public (or your own confidential) data sources.
Customer cases
Applications
Policy analysis and planning
Use a map of the ground subsidence per neighborhood to support a long-term budget request to the municipal council. Zoom in to a neighborhood and use the data to take future subsidence into account in a hydrological study of the sewer system. Or even further, to analyze the likelihood of pipeline damages in the near future. We have ample experience in how to apply the data for these purposes and are actively involved in R&D with university and institutional partners to expand our knowledge further.
Hydrology run-off and sewer flow modeling
The ground elevation determines how rainfall will accumulate both on the surface and in the ground. The current ground elevation is often well known. By using the speed at which the ground is sinking, hydrologists can make more accurate models for future situations. The same goes for sewer systems in soft soil areas, that work under gravity flow. By monitoring the changes in ground subsidence within the sewer network, you can better predict where the sewer system will fail.
Utility pipeline damage risks
When the ground moves, the pipelines that lie in it will come under stress. When those ground movements change a lot along the pipeline track, these stresses greatly increase the risk of ruptures. A common rupture point is where a pipeline enters a building. Until now, it was practically impossible to monitor these ground movements at each building. But using satellite data, we can map the stresses along the pipeline per household address, for an entire service area. Savings up to 20% of the maintenance budget have been reported by pipeline operators!
Building foundation monitoring
When the foundation of a building is not performing well, it’s nearly impossible to detect before significant damages have taken place – at least until now. Foundation failures are often progressive: they start slow and then accelerate. Our millimeter-precise monitoring can find those buildings that are at risk, monitoring an entire city if necessary. Damage models are available (based on peer-reviewed research by the University of Salerno, Italy) and are continuously being developed further to interpret the InSAR data relative to the building’s damage class.
Deformation measurements play an important role in the life-cycle of many civil infrastructures. Being able to perform many measurements before, during and after construction by using satellite data allows engineers and risk managers to optimize infrastructure design, reduce costs of monitoring after completion and plan maintenance well in advance.
Customer cases
Applications
Risk identification for the design phase
In the design phase, use our data to look back in time and determine where compressible soil is present, which surrounding structures have weak foundations, or which seasonal effects from groundwater fluctuations can be expected in the area. Identify weak zones in highways or railroad embankments, or analyze which buildings to monitor in real-time during construction.
Risk monitoring and alerting for the construction phase
During construction, the wide area of the satellite data allows a periodic, high precision analysis of the influence of the project on its surroundings. Prove the limited impact of a tunneling project or of groundwater drawdown by a satellite monitoring campaign. Focus expensive, real-time measurements instead where they are really needed.
Compliance monitoring and planning for the maintenance phase
In the maintenance phase, use satellite information to reduce costs of personnel and road closures and increase the safety of your operation by using our off-site measurement technique. Since the satellites pass very often, use our data to predict when large-scale maintenance will be required (e.g. due to residual settlements) or get early warning of underperformance of the structure (e.g. a hydropower dam when the reservoir is filled).
The extraction of natural resources such as oil, gas or coal from the earth will always lead to surface deformations. In built-up areas, there might be societal worry about the influence on other structures or on ecological consequences. But also in remote areas, surface deformations are often important to monitor – they can cause damage in oil & gas wells and slope instabilities in mining operations. But they can also reveal valuable (proxy) information about the reservoir behavior and how to optimize it.
InSAR has been successfully applied to:
- Reservoir (inverse) modeling
- Finetuning Enhanced Oil Recovery operations
- Quantifying gas or CO2 storage surface effects
- Tracking deep mining-related surface deformation effects
- Monitoring surface mining-related groundwater drawdown effects
Applications
Our Sentinel-1 Processing Facility
With the availability of the new European Sentinel-1 satellites, there is an abundance of freely available, worldwide, high quality data at a weekly interval. We have achieved an unprecedented level of automation and optimization of our data processing facilities in our private cloud infrastructure. Exploiting InSAR monitoring has never been as cost-efficient as it is today.
Confidentiality and reliability guaranteed
The Natural Resources industry is a highly professional and highly competitive industry. Of course, we work at the highest standards of confidentiality and under strict internal quality control. As a member of the S[&]T group, our internal processes follow procedures for project management, software and systems engineering accepted by the most demanding clients such as European Space Agency, NATO and several national intelligence agencies.