Waterlink: smart water management

With our expertise in IoT and inhouse product development team of engineers, designers, firmware developers, … we could rapidly built and test prototypes, getting our hands dirty while proving the power of the technology for the client.

Water-link wanted to gain deep insights into how their pipeline network was functioning and performing. However, the company lacked tools that could intelligently and automatically gather data on what was happening inside their pipes.

We built a retrofit solution that could parasitize off the 28.000 existing underground hydrants, spread over the city of Antwerp. By adding a sensor to 5000 of those hydrants, pressure fluctuations could be monitored in detail and eventually managed in the future, and this throughout the whole pipeline network. In addition, leakage or theft of water could be controlled. We started by mapping out possible project risks, and set up a realistic and lean project timeline with clear goals. One of the first issues that needed to be tackled was the communication from under the street pot’s metal lid. This  influenced the transmission quality and affected the position of the antenna.

The sensor itself is installed 1 meter below street level and is connected to a communication module which sends the measured values over a low frequency network to the cloud. In order to achieve a +10 year battery life solution, we developed a set of algorithms, both on the device and cloud-based. These manage to minimise power usage drastically. The captured data is processed and visualised in an Azure environment. This setup made it easy for Water-link to establish an integration with their existing systems.

This first project part gave us a clear vision on the architecture of the solution for both hardware and software. A cheap and producible sensor is within reach and will be developed during the further course of the project.