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 from leakages and bursts in its network. These leakages take about two to three weeks to be identified because NWSC depends on word of mouth from the locals. Unfortunately, NWSC has not been able to address this problem because their focus is still 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 in real-time and be able to detect and locate leakages remotely from a centralized monitoring system for the pipe network. This was realized by building a prototype of a smart water pressure and flowrate monitoring system capable of verifying flowrate and pressure values at all times and capable of detecting remote leakage magnitudes and location from main distribution points. The key results obtained included real-time feedback on the pressures and flowrate of the flowing water on web application interface using a GSM Module sending HTTP POST requests, from the sensors connected to a microprocessor and notifications in case of leakages when anomalies are detected. Using the outlier detection algorithm, the product of the Gaussian probabilities of each variable clusters compared with a specified threshold was used to identify any leakages compared to the readings of normal flow. The location of each leakage was identified by comparing the speeds of water before the leakage was identified and after the leakage was detected. Further study on the incorporation of an industrial system with wide-fitting sensors and inclusion of pump-related figures should be done to check its effectiveness with big and complex water networks. 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 network infrastructure and water line extensions.