IoT for Smart Water Management

As promised in my last post, I am back with IoT-enabled services for Smart Cities, the first one in the series being Smart Water Management.

With a world population of 7 Billion, water scarcity is not a myth anymore. If the 20th century saw international conflicts over petroleum, the 21st century may witness wars over life’s vital resource, water!

The countries across the world are defining and redefining “smart cities”, but, no city can be truly smart without Smart Water Infrastructure.

Technology comes into play right from the storage and treatment of raw water to its distribution and supply to water taps. There are layers of infrastructure and technologies like automation & control devices, sensor technologies, data analytics software that make water management system truly “smart”. Water infrastructure and technology upgrade would be an essential and substantial chunk of smart city budget everywhere in the world. Almost every water utility around the world needs infrastructure and technology upgrades for an efficient plant operation, pumping optimization, optimum power usage, leak detection, contaminant detection and efficient consumer supply. IoT technologies have the ability to provide both hardware and software support for an automated and data-driven decision support system towards an efficient, good quality, leakage free smart water grid. Listed below are some of the suggested applications where IoT can play a  crucial role in smart water management:

Smart Water Metering: What can’t be monitored can’t be rectified and a network of smart meters that collect granular real-time data across the water grid could help identify leakages, discover hidden patterns in water consumption, use predictive analytics to regulate demand and supply and set up alarms for notifying anomalies.

Detecting leakages in the Water Pipelines: Measuring water pressure in the pipes is not a new technology, but, using this data in real time over an IoT network can help save millions of gallons of water. A search on the internet would reveal instances and examples of huge volumes of water losses in the supply systems all over the world. The figures are as high as 50% losses due to undetected leakages. Electronic and acoustic equipment are already available for detecting leakages, but, the execution of leakage detection programs has been posing a challenge because these devices and programs work in isolation and are disconnected from each other. Smart Meter networks in integration with GIS and GPS, weather information systems and cloud servers can help not only detect leakages fast but also, issue repair orders instantly to the local field engineers.

Tank Level Monitoring: Overhead tanks, both large ones for communities and medium and small ones for individual homes are essential elements of a water grid. Overflowing tanks, a common sight, lead to significant water wastages. Simple devices like  LED light sensors fixed at three levels, say, lower, middle and highest levels in a water tank can help fill tanks as and when required rather than filling at preset schedules, thus, avoiding empty or overflowing tanks. These sensors would send signals to the water pump depending on "full" or "empty" status of the tanks, based on which the pumps would automatically turn off and on, eliminating both manual intervention and the need for pre-scheduled settings. This would not only help conserve water but also power needed to operate the pumps.

Water Quality Monitoring: Contaminated water is perhaps worse than inadequate water supply, causing poor health and low productivity among individuals and societies. The three essential parameters for water quality, namely, the pH, temperature, and turbidity can be easily measured using pH sensors, temperature sensors and turbidity sensors placed across the water network including the pipelines and storage and distribution tanks. Access to this data in real time and acting upon it immediately is what would make all the difference in damage control and in handling the situation satisfactorily. A typical wireless communications network here could be a simple and easy to deploy Zigbee based technology with a transceiver. This technology now comes at a reasonably low cost, with minimal power consumption and is highly reliable and scalable. This could help nip water contamination menace in the bud itself.

IoT-enabled state-of-the-art hardware and software: Currently, the markets across the world have an abundant supply of sensors with high reliability and accuracy at a low cost. In addition, we have been witnessing an unprecedented growth in internet communication technologies that enable us to send and receive data at a great speed anywhere in the world. Also, there is this whole new world of cloud storage technologies eliminating the need for large local data storage networks. With all these factors together, IoT- enabled efficient smart water grids are sure to gain high acceptance at a rapid rate everywhere in the world.

While the applications listed above reveal the efficacy and suitability of the IoT applications for a smart water grid, there are certain challenges that all IoT applications must take into account while designing these systems. The application must ensure interoperability with other applications like the Geographical Information System, weather forecast,  and the databases with information on agriculture, soils, environment etc. Also, the system architecture must be a flexible one that allows integration with other systems and preferably use open interfaces to access diverse water management devices. And finally, the application must support legacy systems, since replacing the legacy systems may not be a feasible option.

Considering the features, functionalities, and challenges outlined above, it would be okay to conclude that a typical IoT-enabled water grid management system architecture should consist of three layers, the sensing layer, the transporting and the network layer, and the application layer. The sensing layer would be the sensors and devices for water level monitoring, quality monitoring, water flow status etc. The network and transporting layer would be the information systems and the wireless network.  And the application layer would consist of models for water quality evaluation, water forecasting models, early warning models for contaminations, equipment failure etc. All these features together would make an intelligent, informational and business oriented IoT-enabled Water Grid for smart cities. This also throws open a multitude of opportunities for entrepreneurs and big businesses alike to develop IoT-enabled technologies for smart water grid.