ABSTRACT

The underground world has become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. India has a massive network of underground pipelines and cables including such items as telecommunication, water pipelines, fibre optic cables, and waste water line. Hitting underground utility lines is a major problem in the construction industry and occurs with disturbing regularities. Record of location of utilities is rarely available, most of the data is located relative to physical feature which may-no longer be available or have been altered. Detection of utilities before evacuation is sometimes most essential for a project development, and most of our utility infrastructure is buried and unable to be directly measured except at surface appurtenances (accessories associated with a particular type of activity). Many a times we are forced to make judgements or assumption on the presence of a utility, since these utilities are not exposed and therefore not able to be directly observed and measured, for this one can use variety of sources for the judgement of the position of a utility like utility records, historical project data, visual cues, reliance upon someones past experience. Sometimes the source data is incorrect. If data is interpreted from these sources one may land up at an incorrect position of the buried utility because the data might be vague, out-of-date or non-existent. Since one may not want to encounter a utility and damage it at time of evacuation one would go for the non-destructive techniques. Common nondestructive techniques include pipe and cable locator (Gradiometrics) that locates pipes/cables by detecting magnetic field around the lines e.g. electric lines and metallic pipes. For non-metallic pipes, Ground Penetrating Radar can be employed to map the buried features using radio waves. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is used to pinpoint the location of buried objects and to map out stratigraphy. It provides a cross-sectional measurement of the shallow subsurface and unlike conventional metal detectors, radar can locate both metal and non-metal objects. Another technique is called elastic wave method (seismic technique) that uses three separate types of acoustic emissions resonant sonics, active sonics and passive sonics. Reflection and Refraction are the most commonly used seismic techniques. Each technique has its advantage and disadvantage depending upon the type of utility to be detected and operating conditions such as dielectric property of the soil or surface which in turn depends upon the factors such as moisture and salinity present in the soil.