Smart Monitoring of Municipal and Industrial Water Applications
WAGO and Endress+Hauser’s digitalization projects extend from Canada to Mexico to South America and Australia in order to integrate distant signals into central IT structures. One of these challenging projects occurred on the doorstep of Germany’s Odenwald forest. Widely distributed measurement points were integrated via a LoRaWAN network, saving several hours of work.
Climate change threatens to place more and more regions into droughts in the coming years. To maximize available resources, water managers from around the world are looking for solutions. A few instruments from the digital toolbox can help, such as monitoring the water draw-off or early leak detection in the water distribution. An increasing number of countries are obliging water producers and consumers to record withdrawals and consumption transparently in municipal and industrial environments. Regulatory measures require defined formats and report types. To meet challenges in the water supply sector, digitalization of the water sector must urgently accelerate, if only because of the skilled labor shortage that has been apparent for some time.
However, water quality control points, wells, high-altitude water reservoirs or pumping stations are often far apart from one another among suppliers or industrial water users, and often in remote regions. Although the sensors in such systems have been accessed via mobile networks for years when mobile radio coverage was available, it was only possible at some locations and was often inconsistent.
As a result, personnel cannot access the necessary data and must check it on site. Highly qualified employees sit in the car for hours only to read simple measured values and store them in government-mandated reports.
Example of water supply for the city of Oberzent in Hesse: Water levels from wells and containers, as well as volume flows from pumps and pipelines, had to be read out individually. “It has long been our duty to record water withdrawals and transmit them to the executive board,” says Thomas Pirk. The water master and his three colleagues are responsible for seven springs, two deep wells and 18 elevated tanks. The challenge is due to the regional specificity: On an area twice as large as Manhattan, but with only about 10,000 inhabitants and very sparsely populated, the measuring points are widely dispersed over the wide Odenwald area.
“There is simply no reception at most of our systems,” says Pirk. Therefore, the four water masters had no alternative but to go down the locations individually and collect the data from the 35 flow, 17 fill level and seven pressure measuring devices on site and enter them manually into a list – a very time-consuming and ineffective procedure that is also prone to errors.
Where previously water levels, water withdrawls or volumetric flows were read on site, the Netilion IIoT ecosystem now handles the visualization of the data transmitted by radio.
Thomas Pirk, Water Champion City of Oberzent
With the establishment and operation of a LoRaWAN network in Oberzent, the local energy supplier Entega recently kicked off the digital age of data acquisition. The abbreviation means “Low Power Wide Area Network”, i.e., a far-reaching network requiring little energy. LoRaWAN is an important pillar of the “Industrial Internet of Things” (IIoT) and offers subscribers secure bidirectional communication, localization, end-to-end encryption and mobile services.
The specialists at Endress+Hauser, a measurement and automation technology provider for the process and laboratory, leveraged these advantages and integrated the 19 stations in the Odenwald into their Netilion IIoT ecosystem. The IIoT ecosystem now visualizes the data transmitted wirelessly and displays it in clearly organized dashboards and in government-defined formats and report types. With a glance at the monitor or a tablet computer, the water masters can see the entire process of water treatment and storage, including container levels and flows.
What is LoRaWAN?
LoRaWAN means “Low Power Wide Area Network” and enables wireless, secure bidirectional communication, service localization and mobility, end-to-end encryption and mobile services. To prolong the battery life of end devices, the LoRaWAN network server manages the data rate used for each end device individually using an adaptive data rate algorithm (ADR). The LoRaWAN data rates range from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps – relatively low for modern media such as photos or videos but sufficient for measurement or status data in many cases. Communication security is guaranteed by two levels – one for the network and one for the application:
“Our Netilion Network Insights digital service is particularly well suited to this application because the city of Oberzent can manage and log its decentralized water applications anytime and anywhere,” says Benedikt Schumann, Business Development Manager at Endress+Hauser. In addition, protocols and verifications are easy to create, and users receive alarms for efficient monitoring. In addition to instrumenting the systems, Endress+Hauser also offers solutions for transfer, data processing and visualization. “We provide the service so that our customers can use their data and create added value,” adds Schumann. For example, status messages from the measurement devices make it clear which measuring points need maintenance. Leaks or other incidents in the water network occur more quickly and can be remedied promptly.
“Our complete solution was only possible through good collaboration with WAGO and using their products,” says Schumann, adding, “We selected WAGO as a system component supplier in order to offer similar monitoring packages for water applications to various customers and industries globally. Flexibility and modularity are crucial in this business.”
Benedikt Schumann, Business Development Manager Endress+Hauser
And not just in the example of the Oberzent water supply, but also in large parts of the IIoT where many different digital and analog values must be processed. The list is long and ranges from Ethernet IP, Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU to HART protocols or IO-Link. Different measurement devices and sensors, from flow meters to door contacts, must be connected to the WAGO Gateway, processed and forwarded to the higher-level system.
The WAGO automation platform relies on manufacturer-independent standards for both hardware and software. More than 500 modules and interfaces are available for communication. Construction kits and complete proof-of-concept boxes were developed for this application to simplify and expedite project implementation on site, which can be individually expanded to meet the project requirements, explains Wolfgang Laufmann.
“The collaboration has always been very intensive, and now we have reached the point where we are developing further edge-based solutions,” says Schumann. The goal is to install additional computing algorithms to offer additional services in the OT environment.
Construction Kits
Digital projects ultimately require numerous individual components and a great deal of commercial effort for implementation. Item numbers, prices and delivery times for controllers, terminal blocks and plugs, power supplies and cables must be searched together. WAGO offers construction kits as a design aid to keep this expense for projects as low as possible. These so-called packages allow users to quickly assemble their communication nodes. After the modules are selected, the system issues a single order, including price and technical features. This leads to secure project planning. There is also a global agreement with individual partners, such as Endress+Hauser, in which, for example, prices for different countries are stored.
A first important function, which will grow in importance: WAGO allows remote verification for measurement device status to be verified remotely. Individual flow meters are tasked with testing themselves and sending hundreds of bits of information bundled back to Netilion Network Insights for verification via the gateway so a certificate of functionality can be created there. This functionality has only recently been established and is currently rolled out globally in various scenarios. These specific advancements on the WAGO Edge Components are flexible and modular and thus serve a wide variety of applications. “In Germany, WAGO is already a well-known company, but we also offer this systematic collaboration in many other countries and are expanding it together,” says Schumann.
While the water masters in Oberzent are happy to store the old company diaries in the archive for the foreseeable future, their next desires are already apparent: “We could well imagine using more digital services from Netilion,” says Pirk. The team is currently working on integrating another ten stations into Netilion Network Insights. At the end, all relevant data is available on the PC and tablet and can be viewed at any time without getting in the car. This relieves the burden on the four-person team, and the focus is now on making the water supply in the 165 km2 municipal area fit for future challenges.