FreeWave, Rockwell tackle water management

How can water utilities keep supplies flowing even when demand is at its highest? FreeWave Technologies and Rockwell Automation are banking on wireless communications and controls.

FreeWave, which makes radios for critical data transmission, is teaming up with Rockwell Automation, to design and implement a comprehensive SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system solution to tackle water utilities’ growing issues in water management.

The problem: Water utilities have tanks that need to be kept full during peak usage times to keep up with increasing demands. Typically, a water tank is connected to a reservoir miles away via a pipeline. However, tank monitoring and pumping operations are being completed manually in many areas, creating numerous inefficiencies and cost constraints.

To complicate matters, the main control rooms, the water reservoir and the water district headquarters are usually geographically dispersed.  In order to keep up with demands, water districts across the US need ways to automate their water demand management and keep their investment low to make such a change feasible to end-users.

“In order to make this application work, the SCADA system needs to be able to monitor the water level in the tank, the line pressure throughout the pipeline and the flow rate when the pump is running, as well as control the drive that runs the pump,” says Ashish Sharma, chief marketing officer of FreeWave Technologies. “It also needs to have a Human Machine Interface (HMI) at the water district headquarters to provide monitoring and control of the entire system for the operators. Clearly, wireless communication is a must, but the system also needs to be very reliable, flexible and cost effective.”