Project Details
[Return to Previous Page]Universal Service Connection Device
Company: Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission
Major(s):
Primary: ME
Secondary: IE
Optional: EE
Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO
Intellectual Property: YES
The WSSC Water is a bi-county, public water/wastewater utility in Maryland that was established in 1918. For over 100 years, WSSC Water has served the communities of Prince George’s and Montgomery counties providing life-sustaining water and water resource recovery services to individuals, families and businesses. WSSC Water maintains and repairs approximately 12,000 miles of buried pipes and several dozen facilities to provide water services to its community. WSSC Water provides potable water to its customer through what is called a “service connection”. Within our system, WSSC Water has approximately 2 million service connections! Service connections are made of thick wall copper tubing. Depending on the house or office building the size of a service connection can very between ¾” to 2” in diameter. These connections a buried underground at a depth of approximately 6 feet. When installing this connection a field crew must bend, shape, and align the copper tube with the water main. In addition, then service connections leak or break, the copper tube may become pinched and need to be “re-rounded”. This is a highly labor-intensive process and current tools to perform this work are inadequate. WSSC Water needs a better tool – something that is very durable, provides great leverage for the field technician and something that is adaptable for varying tubing sizes. The PSU teams will design, develop, and prototype a devise that would meet all of the above requirement and incorporate ergonomics aspects to make the process of using the devise the most comfortable for the field Technician. With approximately 2 million service connection to deal with, this is a very common and frequently executed job. The devise will need to be durable, portable and as light weight as possible. Additional feature for performing this job during the night would be very helpful as WSSC Water works around the clock. The PSU team will have freedom to develop concepts of solutions starting at day 1 of the project. A site visit in the first few weeks will also highlight actual working conditions. The project will allow WSSC Water to continue to provide a highly reliable water source to approximately 2 million customers by allowing WSSC Water employees to install and make repairs as quickly as possible and move on to serving the next customer.
