Telemetry system installation at the mountainous areas of the JGDMTelemetry Systems
About JGDM
Joe Gqabi District Municipality (JGDM) is one of the seven district municipalities of Eastern Cape province in South Africa. The JGDM consists of the towns of Aliwal North, Barkly East, Burgersdorp, Jamestown, Lady Grey, Maclear, Mount Fletcher, Oviston, Rhodes, Rossouw, Sterkspruit, Steynsburg, Ugie and Venterstad.
Problem statement
The area needed a telemetry system to monitor and control various reservoirs, pump stations, and other infrastructure within the water distribution network. Remote monitoring of water infrastructure has become an essential operational requirement for municipalities and water utilities and JGDM wanted to meet this requirement.
Solution architecture
- Barkly East is the regional head office from where the telemetry is being managed. The system was designed to operate as multiple small systems that operates within each of the towns. Data from the various outstations is sent to a central location in each of the small systems or towns. An Adroit SCADA does all the visualization, trending and alarm management in each of these localized systems.
- The environment is extremely mountainous and not conducive for long distance radio communications. Data is sent from each of the local SCADA sites to the main SCADA in Barkly East by means of a 3G link. More than 70 Sites were installed in this region covering more than 25 000km².
- The Elpro 415U-2-C4 was selected for this project due to the ease of use and implementation in this rural and mountainous environment. All I/O on each of the sites were wired directly into the radio or expansion I/O module. Peer-to-peer data was sent to control reservoir levels and the same data was also sent to the Barkly East SCADA system for display and trending purposes over the 3G link.
- At the Barkley East central control room, the Adroit SCADA system was installed to handle all the visualization and trending functions and alarm management with SMS notification. The 415U-2-C4 at the central site can present the data inside it to the SCADA system in Modbus RTU/TCP or DNP3. In this case the client selected Modbus. The SCADA system polls the various Modbus registers in the base radio via the Modbus Protocol.
- Apart from the process data, various diagnostic registers are used to display the signal strength, battery voltage, mains voltage and channel utilization.
- The units really excelled with the easy diagnostics enabling the system integration team to quickly find and rectify problems. The ability to do a traffic log that could be opened in Wireshark saved a lot of time during diagnostics.
Conclusion
The client envisaged that by the end of the project they will be able to monitor and control various reservoirs, pump stations, Water Treatment Works (WTW), Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW) and other infrastructure within the water distribution network from a central control center.
The data was logged and trended on the SCADA system at the centralized control room were operations staff were able to monitor remote sites, view alarms and perform control functions. The ultimate goal of the project was achieved within time and budget.