The second application area for which wireless sensor and actuator networks are of high importance is drinking water provision and waste water management. Pipeline networks need to be monitored in order to ensure the quality of the drinking water and to react quickly in case of accidents, e.g. if pipelines are broken. This type of monitoring is integrated into kind of SCADA like management system and is used 24 hours, 7 days a week. In addition, drinking water reservoirs are considered to be a very sensible part of the network since manipulating the drinking water quality e.g. by poisoning it in the reservoir has immediate impact on customers. In addition to those applications FWA pointed out that currently groundwater supervision is done with mobile measurement equipment. I.e. currently a small team is using a lorry equipped with measurement tools to access part of the measurement points or accessing those points by foot. This task should be simplified by wireless integration in the existing monitoring network. By that not only cost for monitoring can be reduced but also the frequency of measurements could be increased.

Planned WSN deployment for water distribution pipelines in Frankfurt Oder.

For more information, please consult our deliverable on demonstrators parameters.