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Case Study: La Société Wallonne des Eaux achieves 600% faster automated 3D crack detection and €2M savings with Bentley
A Bentley Case Study
La Société Wallonne des Eaux Creates Digital 3D Database of Company Assets
La Société Wallonne des Eaux (SWDE), the main drinking-water provider for Belgium’s Wallonne region, needed an accurate, accessible 3D database and a reliable way to detect structural defects on hundreds of aging water towers. Traditional ground surveys and manual analysis of drone footage missed small cracks and were time-consuming, so SWDE partnered with Bentley to apply its MicroStation, Pointools, and ContextCapture tools and explore an automated crack-detection workflow.
Bentley developed an AI-enabled analysis on ContextCapture reality meshes—built from 3,000 drone images and refined in MicroStation/Pointools—to automatically identify and quantify cracks down to 0.1 mm. The Bentley solution detected 1,704 cracks (520 under 2 mm), sped up analysis by 600%, was twice as reliable as manual methods, reduced survey time by 66%, and saved SWDE more than EUR 2 million while establishing a baseline for long-term preventative maintenance.
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La Société Wallonne des Eaux
Christophe Taelman
Design Engineer