Construction World February 2022

Imagine your job was to oversee a group of water reservoirs dispersed over a large area — how would you expect to monitor water levels at each reservoir and control water pumps accordingly? Using a wireless telemetry system of course. Here Ian Loudon, International Sales and Marketing Manager at wireless pump monitoring and control specialist Omniflex, explores what is needed for industry to overcome these challenges. WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY FOR SA’s RESERVOIRS W ater reservoirs are often situated in geographically dispersed areas and can be difficult to access. This means that asset managers must rely on remote monitoring alone programmable controller independent of SCADA using wireless networking to monitor remote I/O for control implementation. This makes installation quick and simple, allowing asset managers to save on any additional hardware or engineering requirements.

and control systems to monitor water levels and turn pumps on and off at each reservoir from a centralised control station. Wireless monitoring of all reservoirs from a centralised control system allows asset managers to know what the water levels are at each site at a glance. Wireless technology also increases operational flexibility, since it is much simpler to move a wireless device compared to a cable unit. New globally defined license-free ISM band radio telemetry equipment, Industrial, scientific and medical band radio frequency spectrum (ISM) has proven to be a game changer, helping equipment owners avoid unnecessary licensing and admin costs. The wireless units can be directly interfaced to an existing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system using the on-board ethernet ports or function as a stand-

Furthermore, Omniflex’s cloud-based Data2Desktop platform allows asset managers to monitor systems 24/7 using a tablet or phone, rather than having to use a fixed desktop in the plants control room. This new generation of plug-and-play wireless telemetry equipment is benefitting more than just water reservoir managers. This technology is also extremely beneficial in other industries, such as mining where they rely on surface-level control of sub surface water pumps to remove water from the mines. In fact, any industry where cabling is either too expensive, or too disruptive, to install can benefit from adopting this kind of plug-and-play wireless telemetry system. 

25 CONSTRUCTION WORLD FEBRUARY 2022