Industrial · Frontier
Corrosion-Under-Insulation Moisture Sentinel
Finds moisture soaking into pipe insulation — the hidden start of expensive corrosion.
Plausible physics, early work — shown honestly as an experiment.
How it works
Dry insulation barely affects WiFi waves, but wet insulation slows and weakens them sharply. A damp section of a pipe run therefore stands out as a fixed spot where the signal changed and keeps slowly worsening. Nothing moves, so no motion sensor could ever see it — but the field can.
In the physics: Dry insulation (eps_r ~1.1-2) turning wet (water eps_r~80, plus conductivity sigma rise) drastically changes local attenuation and adds excess propagation delay on paths passing the pipe run. The change is spatially localized and monotonically slow — exactly the signature a drift detector wants, and invisible to any Doppler method because nothing moves.
See it work
This is real pipeline output for Industrial, replayed. The exact reading depends on your room.
Go deeper
How the field becomes an answer
How we prove it
Own-hardware: insulated pipe mockup between ESP32 nodes, inject measured water volumes (50-500ml) into the insulation annulus, verify detection threshold and localization to the wetted segment; control with equivalent surface-only wetting that dries out.
Who it is for
A standing CUI watch on every insulated line between turnarounds — sold to the integrity/inspection manager as 'find the wet insulation before it becomes a wall-thickness finding.'
runtime Runs today in LatentField 2.0 as presence
The matching solution
Complete first-room estimateMachine Bay Watch6 nodes · ~$320 parts · 120 min Request kit, subscribe, or set up →Compatible DIY hardware options
120 min · advanced
240 min · installer