Smart water grid

The water pollution by solid and liquid impurities leads to a change in its optical and dielectric properties. This changes the transparency, which can be controlled in the optical range at several wavelengths. Using of multiple frequency bands allow to evaluate the transparency of water in these bands, as well as to estimate the size of present in water solid micro impurities with the help of transparency. The use of method of capillary-waveguide resonance allows to detect the presence of micro impurities in the water, and to assess its purity. Thus in the range of 60 .. 68 GHz with this method may detect impurities with boundary concentrations of 0.1%.

To increase the purity of water is necessary to spend more time and money. However, to satisfy the different needs of different people need water with varying purity. The purest water should be drinking water and water for cooking. For household needs (washing dishes, laundry, cleaning, watering of the site), can be used water with less purification. To create water with a set quality is necessary to develop the low-cost sensors that can be installed in consumer’s apartments for continuous real-time operational control of incoming water to the apartment.

Because for water supply to the consumer needs to use a single system, providing them with water of different quality possible by using time division of drinking and industrial water with set of units of water treatment (filters, ultra-filtration membrane, reactors, etc.), while controlling the supply of water to each apartment. This allows you to use the new Smart Grid technology to provide each customer with water to a desired quality.

In this regard, considerable interests are the new Smart Grid technologies, which will take over the function of monitoring the health of users, water quality management, as well as transport and energy infrastructure in cities. Their development is directly related to the design and developments of intelligent sensors monitor the quality of incoming water to the consumer, which combine a number of qualities:

• Low cost and ease of use;
• Reliability of the information from the customer which it depends for its security;
• The possibility of continuous-time monitoring of water quality to the consumer;
• The ability to supply water to the consumer with the required quality and cost.

Leakage is a huge concern in areas of high water stress. Leaks not only mean lost water and revenue, they also increase water companies’ energy bills for pumping and treating water that never gets used. Detecting and dealing with leaks is the problem to solve in the project and it is set to be a huge market.

Problems solved in the project:

• Minimization of the costs for providing consumers with drinking and industrial water.
• Fullest through phased water use from the moment of the first customers to the consumer and subsequent disposal or return of water to clean up and re-use.
• The development of sensors for water quality control to ensure the continuity of control in real time.
• The development of software tools for optimization of water resources control and supply of water to each customer with determine quality.

Experience of our team in creating such systems in energy sector can be successfully applied to create smart distribution systems and water consumption. The information about one of such international project with our participation can be briefly available on the project website: http://smarthg.di.uniroma1.it/

The picture above demonstrates short concept of such smart water management architecture. The system is based on modern web services technology and use computer cluster’s systems to deploy services for wide web access for each smart home system. The management tool includes mobile systems to make remote control of whole smart house.

Recommendations:

Focusing on optimization from the earliest stages will allow water utilities to more effectively deploy a smart water system. In addition, utilities deploying smart water technologies should involve customers from the earliest stages of planning and deployment. Finally, water utilities should plan for decreased departmentalization and an integrated system that maximizes information, through both information technology and operations technology.