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Remote transmission of groundwater data at dams

Overview: Lake Rottach / Lake Gruenten

 

Intro

The two bodies of water that we are talking about in this project, lake Rottach, covering 300ha, and lake Gruenten, covering 130ha, are both artificial lakes, built to regulate water flow and discharge of the rivers Iller and Danube, and to also generate hydro-power for local consumption.

The challenge
The task was to set up a remote system for monitoring the groundwater level in the bodies of the earth-fill dams at the reservoirs and to transmit the collected data to the joint control room at the Rottach reservoir.

The solution
Given the vicinity of all sites this project was destined to be executed with Adcon's UHF radio technology. Several ADCON A723 addIT mini-RTUs at the dams transmit the data at close range to a central relay station at the dam crest. This station at the Rottach reservoir is a dedicated UHF repeater station forwarding the data directly to the base station, the ADCON A850 Telemetry Gateway.

While the level monitoring stations at Lake Gruenten make use of the same short-range mini loggers A723 addIT as at the Rottach dam, data is forwarded by an ADCON RA440, a hybrid device, containing both a UHF radio to communicate with the RTUs, and a GPRS modem to transmit data via an IP-connection back to the ADCON A850 Telemetry Gateway.

Water level readings at all sites are performed by OTT's well-known PLS sensors, chosen for their accuracy and long-term stability, thanks to their outstanding ceramic measuring cell.

Summary
ADCON technology is perfectly flexible to establish custom solutions for any radio condition. In this particular situation, having many measuring sites in close proximity, ADCON provided two technically very different solutions perfectly matching the requirements: both sites deploy local networks of many small and economical RTUs to collect the data, one site relays this data back to base via a long range UHF repeater, while the other site makes use of a UHF-to-GPRS bridge device, the RA440, since topography and distance could not be overcome by a UHF link.

ADCON devices deployed:

Stations - UHF - GPRS

Case Study Summary

Application
Monitoring groundwater level in dams

Location
Kempten, Germany

Products deployed
A850 Telemetry Gateway
A723 addIT RTU
A753 addWAVE RTU
OTT PLS

Customer
Wasserwirtschaftsamt Kempten

Parameter recorded
Groundwater level

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