1.000km of river under close observation

Intro
The Danube, flowing through 10 countries, is Western Europe’s largest river. Over a third of its total length of 2857km flows through Romania, placing almost 98% of the country within the Danube Basin. Not only is the Danube a major contributor to Romania’s water resources (44%), it also is a major source of income through shipping and fishing, a carrier of wastewater discharges, a major contributor to irrigation schemes – and a permanent threat through flooding.

Task
To keep a close eye on the development of the river level over a stretch of 1075km (!) by installing 20 monitoring sites to record the surface water level and water temperature, precipitation along the river and along some of the Danube's tributaries plus air temperature and rel. humidity, and to transmit that data back to the national authorities headquarter every hour on the hour.

Solution
Due to the terrain and the large distances between sites, UHF was no option. Luckily enough all sites were within mobile phone coverage. Power was supplied by ADCON's compact solar panels. Since several sensors needed to be installed right away, and the customer wanting the option to add more later on, the A753 addWAVE GPRS with its 60 default channels became the RTU of choice.

Due to the necessity to also measure water temperature, most sites were equipped with the ADCON combo-sensor LEV2, providing both pressure and temperature. On some sites that did not need water temperature and featured a bridge, an OTT RLS radar level sensor was installed. To read air temperature, relative humidity and precipitation, ADCON TR1s and RG1s were added.

All installation work, including civil works, was performed flawlessly by Adcon’s local partner, BEIA Consult International. To manage all stations they setup the A850 Telemetry Gateway at the client’s headquarter, where an addVANTAGE Pro 6.4 server was also installed.

ADCON devices deployed in the project

• A850 Telemetry Gateway
• A753 addWAVE GPRS
• 540mA Solar Panel
• OTT RLS radar level sensor
• ADCON TR1 air temperature & humidity
• ADCON RG1 rain gauge