Building the "Internet of Water" to Redirect Storm Runoff
Storms are increasing, but in some cities sewer infrastructure has aged out and can't redirect the water, creating flooding in downstream neighborhoods. University of Michigan engineers are creating a smarter water system out of existing infrastructure and developing technologies to make environmental information more easily accessible. Sensor nodes that measure the water flow, soil moisture, rainfall, and other rapidly changing storm predictors are being installed along a three square mile local water catchment. With the data being posted in real time over the internet, the team hopes this can someday be paired with sensors on waste water pipes designed to redirect and reuse excess water flow into less impacted neighborhoods.
Transcript
00:00:02 It's a smart water system , I hate that term, but that's kind of what we're trying to build. A city like L.A. might flush a billion gallons into the Pacific after a large rain event because the infrastructure was designed to do that. It was designed to get the water out of the city as fast as you could. You can strategically hold back certain portions of that water and potentially even reuse it,
00:00:40 You're effectively talking about solving L.A.'s water problem. Using sensors that will connect to the internet, this smart water system could control the valves and pumps needed to divert water into neighborhoods unaffected by the storm. We have these new advanced technologies in the form of microcontrollers and wireless communications, we're trying to take that and attach it to infrastructure to make it more dynamic, to make it more adaptive and to make it more responsive. Right now we're assembling some of these sensor nodes. We are going to have ten distributed within a three square mile catchment. We are on our way to what's called Ellsworth Pond.
00:01:27 We identified it because...basically because we got access to it from the county. You will see, it takes like a day or two to deploy this and all of a sudden you have data that you've never seen before like streaming it like a minute resolution, right? Do you have the wrench? They're going to measure the flow in open channels, they are going to measure soil moisture, they measure rainfall and they're also going to measure water quality and as soon as you connect the battery the data starts streaming to the internet and you can visualize it or more importantly you can start feeding it to larger scale models that were running to predict how flows are going to behave down the road.
00:02:02 We're not offering a new solution we're just taking what exists and attaching these technologies to them to make them more effective. You can do that, it turns out, for way less money and hopefully the lessons that we learn at the three square mile area are going to help inform how we build the cities of the future and how we manage water in large urban environments. We're prototyping a platform for the measurement of hypoxic conditions on smaller and medium-sized lakes. We put the boat out on the water it's going to use this temperature sensor to measure where there's variations in temperature throughout