Managing East Coast Sewerage Commission’s Flooding/Drainage

One of the largest waste water treatment plants on the east coast of the US relies on Elpro’s 915U-2 to report flows and control sluice gates, on a river spanning 150 miles. The area is relatively flat, and has a number of small tributaries flowing into the main river.

As such, the organization monitors flows and levels and controls a number of sluice gates to prevent tributary flooding. Prior to the project, they did not have any remote telemetry capabilities, and controlled all gates manually based on historical trends. The vision of remote telemetry had been around since the 1970’s when leased phone lines made it possible, however they had many challenges including financial and technical.

By utilizing Neal Systems Inc technical services, this vision came to life. By January 2017, 72 sites are now reporting back to the treatment plants SCADA system. In many cases there was not a sufficient radio path to allow the 915U-2 radios to use their 900MHz radios to send the data direct. Instead a hybrid cellular/900MHz system was used: clusters of 915U-2’s sent their data to a central 915U-2 which was connected to a cellular modem.

The 915U-2 was selected for its high level of security encryption with AES 256 Bit being deployed and the self healing meshing capability.

Due to the long winding nature of the valley, multiple repeater would be required, and the need to automatically switch repeater if one location lost power. The 915U-2’s Meshing capability provided this redundancy with a simple and flexible rollout in configuring this functionality.