Aquapolo: Enhancing Water Security and Efficiency with IoT

The Twin Oaks branch of the Austin Public Library wanted to upgrade its existing rainwater harvesting system to improve its wet-weather performance.

When severe weather hits, the potential damage to a home could be disastrous. Insurance claims for flooding damage exceed $3 billion per year in the United States, and most homeowners are not even covered for even basic water damage to carpet, drywall, electrical, furniture and personal items. Sump pumps are one of the best defenses against flood damage, but when storms knock out electricity, traditional sump pumps are rendered useless. As a seller of water management and equipment protection, Pentair sought a communication platform that will support a wide range of Pentair Internet-connected products.

For many industrial operations involving the distribution of gas in, say, a manufacturing plant, there are numerous risks involved such as leaks. Like most operations of its type, such facilities can ill afford much downtime.

The plant manager and safety teams needed a solution that provided near real-time visibility of gas detection and personnel location, with easy to understand visualization and alerting dashboards. This would enable them to improve productivity through decreasing the time taken to start work, optimize evacuation route planning, and to meet critical staff safety and compliance goals.

WIN-911’s partner product ALERT is a key element in the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system “FabView” from Air Liquide. Air Liquide is the second largest supplier of industrial gasses in the world. This SCADA alarm notification system is specifically designed to monitor, among other things, the distribution of gas in a semiconductor manufacturing plant located in Dresden Germany. Like most operations of its type, this facility can’t afford much downtime in its distribution facility. If ALERT detects a leak in a pipeline, the system evaluates how severe the leak is and transfers the data back to the central site or home office. Once the information is back in the main office, the SCADA alert system then transcribes the data into understandable messages to which employees can respond appropriately.

Water, after air, is the second most critical natural resource our lives depend upon. Maintaining adequate clean and safe water supply to urban residents has become ever-challenging. This is especially so under the pressure from the rapid urbanization of the populations in developing countries and increasingly severe constraints of available water resources in many parts of the world. The situation is exacerbated by the inadequate and aging equipment deployed in the water supply infrastructure and the ineffectiveness in the management of the operations of the equipment. The consequence of these conditions impacts to the health and quality of lives of millions of urban residents. The prevailing conditions in the urban water supply systems include: • Safety: Inability to timely detect water quality issues that may lead to health problems • Service Availability: Inability to detect, address and prevent, on a timely basis, operational issues that cause unnecessary service outages • Efficiency: Inability to assess and identify water leakages, and to identify and address energy over-consumption in heavy operational assets (e.g. water-pressurizing bumps), both leading to wastefulness of valuable resources and in the latter case negatively impacting the environment • Effectiveness: Inability to optimize the operation of a group of water-pressuring pumps to provide equitable water supply and to avoid equipment damages under these conditions.