Abstract
Abstract Water infrastructure in cities is complex and requires proactive management to optimise function. The scale and distribution of assets across municipalities requires affordable systems which can trigger alerts. Systems underpinned by low-cost sensors could meet increasing monitoring needs: more assets, more often, and at a better resolution. However, low-cost sensors require appropriate testing to assess their performance and optimise their use. Here, we focus on low-cost water level sensors, often considered as the main monitoring parameters for water-related infrastructures. We developed a platform and testing protocol to assess the suitability of low-cost sensors. We assessed the performance of three widely used low-cost sensors: laser-ranging, ultrasonic-ranging, and pressure. Our main results showed that the ultrasonic sensor offers the best price to accuracy ratio, and the pressure sensor provides the highest accuracy while still at a very low cost. Our platform and protocol provide a standardised testing and calibration method which can be applied to any sensor. The platform can be used to gather and share results, to enhance community knowledge and encourage the use of new (low-cost or not) sensors. The development of low-cost sensors is an important step toward the wider use monitoring systems for water infrastructure.
Highlights
Over the past few centuries, the water sector has seen major paradigm changes regarding drinking water (Walski 2006), sewage (Beder 1993; Geels 2006), and more recently urban drainage (Chocat et al 2007; Fletcher et al 2015)
We propose platform to assess the performance of low-cost water level sensors
To address to the need for extensive testing of low-cost sensors, we developed a platform and protocol to assess the range, accuracy, and precision of any water level sensor
Summary
Over the past few centuries, the water sector has seen major paradigm changes regarding drinking water (Walski 2006), sewage (Beder 1993; Geels 2006), and more recently urban drainage (Chocat et al 2007; Fletcher et al 2015). In the last few decades, we have seen a rapid expansion of water-related infrastructure associated with the expansion of cities. Medium to long-term operation of infrastructure is becoming a priority for all infrastructure, and the economic context that many industrial countries are facing will reinforce the shift from replacement to management (ASCE 2011). Increasing monitoring is required to shift from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance when considering assets for which there is a low level of knowledge or very limited resources to permit regular inspections or audits. Today’s asset management capabilities are largely limited by constrained budgets (Marlow et al 2013)
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