Unmanned Aerial Vehicle The latest drone news
Drones might quickly be saving cash and lives in Pennsylvania by finding deserted – probably harmful – fuel wells.
US Aerial Video Inc. (UAV) lately completed a six-month proof-of-concept challenge for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission in partnership with the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Using a magnetometer connected to a drone, technicians situated a number of deserted and unmarked fuel wells throughout a swathe of southwestern Pennsylvania. Locating such potential bother spots is sweet information for the Turnpike Commission because it plans to develop a freeway via the wooded space.
With some greater than a century previous, deserted wells can run hundreds of toes deep and could also be in any other case undetectable by typical strategies.
“The drone surveyed the ground surface and detected wells by sensing perturbation with the earth’s magnetic field caused by vertical steel well casing. That allowed us to map the wells prior to the contractor randomly discovering them – saving the project money,” Ken Heirendt, Geo-Technical Engineering Manager of the PA Turnpike Commission, stated.
The drone challenge collected greater than 125-line miles of knowledge over 5 areas alongside the proposed hall. In one half-mile sq. grid alone, the drone discovered 41 potential targets – 5 of which turned out to be unmarked fuel wells.
“During this project, we were challenged by many facets of integrating these technologies,” Luke Wylie, COO of US Aerial Video, stated. He added:
“In addition to overcoming the hardware challenges, we had to develop complex flight procedures to successfully collect actionable magnetic data in the rugged areas in which we were operating, all while complying with FAA regulations governing drone use. We are pleased that we were able to identify dozens of abandoned wells during this project. We’re confident this airborne magnetometer technology is poised to be a game changer for many industries such as earthworks, mineral exploration, utilities, asset recovery and more.”
Detecting harmful fuel is simply one other day on the job for drone tech. Last 12 months, Martin Instrument and Microdrones launched a UAS methane detection answer, the mdTector1000 CH4. In 2016, San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric Company introduced a check challenge to make use of drones for methane leak detection throughout the utility’s 70,000-square-mile service space.
