Snaking under your feet as you stroll the streets from Harrisburg Hospital to Broad Street Market: Six miles of pipes delivering heat from a steam generation plant to the Capitol Complex, the hospital, the Hilton, and about 130 other buildings.
Harrisburg’s steam system was a turn-of-the-20th-century technological marvel. Now, its maps are getting a 21st century makeover. Owner NRG Energy Center, Harrisburg, has tapped Harrisburg University of Science and Technology students to use geospatial mapping to computerize and pinpoint information on the complex system’s many pieces.
“There are various steam traps that release water from the steam pipes, and expansion joints that allow the pipe to expand and contract depending on how hot or cold it gets,” said Jan Sockel, NRG’s Harrisburg vice president and general manager. “There are valves that turn parts of the system on and off, and there are valves that control the pressure of the system; there are a lot of devices under the street that regulate and make the system functional.”
About two years ago, NRG donated $40,000 for HU scholarships and offered to place students in real-world projects. That prompted HU’s Albert Sarvis, assistant professor of geospatial technology and project management, to write the project updating NRG’s existing maps.
First step: Identify 12 system features, such as pipes and fittings, and 10 to 25 attributes for each – pressure classification, insulation, last repair date, threaded or welded connection – down to the number of letters and decimal places.
Second step, now underway: Align information from the paper maps with coordinate-based GIS data – think Google Earth – to more precisely site each feature. The end result will be a database and maps that can be analyzed, manipulated, and easily accessed by everyone from maintenance crew to company executives.
“GIS is a specialized program,” Sockel said. “We don’t have that now. We have file drawers. Those file drawers are now loaded in this computer program.”
Recent HU graduate Amanda Zuck, first student on the project, participated in the long meetings to catalog every element and attribute. She now knows the difference between a sewer manhole and downtown Harrisburg’s 80 or so steam manholes. More importantly, she learned that NRG personnel were “a lot less scary” than she feared. She once bravely pointed out inconsistencies that others had overlooked.
“They’d say, ‘Nice catch. Oh yeah, thank you,’” she said. “I was one of them.”
Zuck envisions a career combining environmental science – her original major – with the art of GIS mapping. Maybe she’ll map wind turbines and their effect on life around them. Maybe she’ll map natural gas wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale.
“Eventually, it’d be cool to see the water tests,” she said. “I wouldn’t be the one out collecting samples, but I would be the person bringing all the data into the wells showing the pollution or lack of pollution.”
While NRG gets an efficiency boost from the new maps, it’s also helping build the next generation of utility workers and energy suppliers, Sockel said.
“The university is science, technology engineering, and mathematics,” he said. “That’s about everything we do here.”
