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Customer application 17 February 2024

IIoT for Water Resource Management

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.

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LoRaWAN Network Changes the Situation

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:

on the network level with a unique network key (IEEE-EUI64) and
at the application level with the application key (IEEE EUI64), which ensures security at the application level.