Development of an Internet of Things Based(IoT) Smart Distributed Water Pipeline Monitoring System For Effective Management in a Smart City Environment

Abstract

Pipeline has been a cheap and major means of transporting range of refined goods and liquids across the world. Water pipelines has been a means of transporting water from the source or main supply to districts and to various households. Failures to these water pipelines exists in various forms which can be aging, mechanical pipeline vandalism and external forces due to environmental condition, which results from fatigues and cracks found in longitudinal welds of the pipeline, hence pipelines becomes brittle and prone to early failure resulting in leakage. Studies have shown that the occurrence of failures on pipelines are worth large sums of money as they look extremely difficult to ignore as they are means of conveying important commodities from the source to fork. The growth of urban areas across the Nigeria may necessitate the need for a more efficient pipeline leak detection technique for detecting failures or leaks in pipelines which can prove to be more efficient, reliable and safe option, as the traditional method of monitoring leaks in pipelines using visual/biological means of surrounding remote pipelines with trained dogs, experienced personnel and smart pigging techniques are not cost effective and unsustainable for continuous monitoring of leaks of distributed water supply networks. With the advancement of Internet of Things technology to a smart/real-time monitoring system can developed to monitor the supply of water showing the total consumption by the community and an system that notifies administrators if there is an incidence of leakage is developed in this work, accompanying this research works is a real-time data visualisation dashboard that collects and analyse data collected from IoT enabled devices connected to sensors, that shows variations in flow-rate at every interval of time. The result of this research project shows that my system has a high response time with worst case being 2s while several others are 1s. It also shows that user can receive prompt notification of failure in water pipelines.