Design and Implementation of a Smart Water Pressure and Flowrate Monitoring System.

Abstract

National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) loses about 1.7 billion Uganda Shillings every year in Non-Revenue Water (NRW) from leakages and bursts in its network. These leakages take several weeks to be identified because NWSC depends on reports handed by word of mouth. Unfortunately NWSC has not been able to address this problem because of its continuous focus on service delivery to more regions in Uganda. The purpose of this project is to create a tool to collect data on water pressure and flowrate values in real time and be able to detect and locate leakages remotely from a centralized monitoring system for a water distribution network. This was realized by building a prototype of a smart water pressure and flowrate monitoring system, capable of capturing pressure and flowrate readings periodically using sensors and detecting leakages and cross referencing their locations from the sensors at specific water distribution points. The key results obtained included real time feedback on pressure and flowrate values of the water flowing through a piping system on a designed web application user interface from a microprocessor unit connected to a sensors sending data through a GSM module by performing an HTTP POST request, the efficiency of an outlier detection algorithm that computes cumulative probabilities and compares them with a specified threshold to determine a leakage and the efficiency of a leakage location algorithm in locating leakages by computing the water speeds and determining the point at which a leakage affected the flowrate in the system. Further incorporation of an industrial system with several wide fitting sensors and inclusion of a pump should be done to check its effectiveness in reducing the losses due to unwanted consumption of water through leakages In conclusion, the necessity of such a system to effectively reduce NWSC losses in terms of non-revenue water is based on their future plans of improved network infrastructure and water line extensions.