Irrigation control for urban environments

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Challenge

In order to use water wisely in modern cities, we must change the way allocate our water resources. To do this, cities must improve their irrigation practices by basing their irrigation decisions on precise and relevant parameters: : (i) weather data from weather stations; (ii) weather forecast obtained from complex predictions available at internet and (iii) data based generated from the system. Although there are generally several irrigation controllers in a city (owned by the municipality and citizens) associated with huge amounts of money spent on water and energy, none are sophisticated or coordinated enough to make complicated and fundamental decision about the best irrigation option. The continuous monitoring and updating programming of irrigation systems is a very time consuming task that requires multiple and repetitive visits to the sites. This is a resource intensive activity in terms of time as well as energy. Today, in large municipalities one might find as many as 500 computer irrigation programmes operating independently. Even the somewhat simple task of reprogramming these programmes, may take days at which point the coordinated weather data and input data is outdated and must be re-entered. Moreover, public irrigation systems are subject to damage from exposure to users and city residents. And because irrigation processes usually takes place at night, early detection of damage does not generally occur. Therefore, fundamental water/energy resources are wasted every day.

Solution

The ER Network controller that we have developed and successfully applied is an internet based irrigation system that has all the built-in virtual intelligence and resources required to gather all the relevant information to produce the real time best irrigation decision. The system constantly surveys the internet sites providing accurate weather predictions and the real time weather information is directly cross checked with data from local weather stations installed at each irrigation site including statistical weather data. The ER Network controller is also equipped with powerful communication capabilities like Internet, GSM, 3G, or RDS- Radio Broadcast and is bidirectional which allows detecting anomalies in irrigation operation. The existence of a municipally free system that both municipality and resident people can use to operate their irrigation systems provides the perfect platform for implementing automatic processes leading the friendly environment decisions and also to anticipate general urban necessities. The multi communication ability of the ER Network controller NRCS system that we have developed is to reduce greatly the cost of each controlled device opening the possibility to make available powerful resources for both big and small systems. Most of the water demand is controlled by the municipality and therefore by applying the ER Network controller system to the municipality that results in good water demand predictions and adequate allocation of water resources to irrigation will be of major importance for the implementation of sustainable non potable water on irrigation systems.

Results

The centralized ER Network controller system has successfully been installed in more than 100 hectares, allowing a municipality to save around 600.000m3 of water per year from the system’s efficient optimized management and early leaking detection capabilities. Future implementations of the NRCS platform benefit from years of experience and experimentation, resulting in a simpler more stable end-solution; additionally, the current system has a five year warranty. Introducing the system in a city allows much better management of water with much less man power and with water savings of more than 50% over traditional standard systems. By connecting rain prediction from the internet with immediate and automatic control of the irrigation systems, the system saves an area of 100 ha about 10.000m3 of drinking water in a single day.

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