Drinking Water and Sewerage at the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE and Implementation of an Internet of Things Flowmeter

Abstract

The Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE is an institution that in 2022 celebrates 100 years of creation. The current main campus was built in 1989 and approximately provides its facilities to 14,187 people every day, including students, professors, and workers located in Sangolquí, Ecuador, Southamerica. The drinking water and sewerage pipes of the university are more than 33 years old, which makes an assessment of their operation urgent. The objectives of the article were to collect the information on the drinking and sanitary water drainage to know the state of the pipes, through measurements of the supplies of drinking water and pressures, therefore, to propose a solution installing a first IoT flowmeter that provides real-time information on water consumption in a building of the university and study the dynamics of the series generated with recurrence maps. The average pressure on the campus was approximately 20 m of water column (mwc), which was acceptable, however, in the south of the main campus, low pressures of less than 10 mwc were obtained with the drinking water and sewage pipes in poor condition. The supply of drinking water was 213.16 L per capita per day. The implementation of the IoT flowmeter was complicated by the deterioration of the material of most of the pipes, however, it was possible to install the first flowmeter in the administrative building, which demonstrated the technical feasibility of controlling water consumption. In real-time on a university test place. The recurrence maps provided recurring series with a period of 20 h.