Project: Battery Powered Flowmeters and RTU’s

Client: Water PNG

Products: Waterflux 3070C V3 and PT Orange RTU

Brands: KROHNE, Metasphere

The KROHNE Waterflux was selected because of its proven reliability and performance accuracy. It also has the additional features on integrated pressure and temperature sensors, which provides Water PNG valuable network data plus water usage totals for billing purposes.

Key data now gathered by Water PNG:

• Volume metering
• Flow rate calculation and archiving
• District Metering basic data
• Daily transmission of data
• Daily volume
• Average flow rates (values in m³/h)
• Pressure & Temperature
• Night time flow to monitor the flow rate during an adjustable time frame (2-4 am)
• Monitoring of the preset thresholds
• Alarm signal when values are exceeded or undershoot

The PT Orange RTU, manufactured by Metasphere, was ideally suited for the data acquisition, due to its ease of deployment and no third-party integration required.

Point Orange is a compact Logger/RTU device with integrated battery, GSM/GPRS or 3G modem, internal/external antenna, flexible IO options, Modbus master capability and a submersion sensor.

Key Features:

• Real time remote monitoring of up to 5 programmable IO channels, allowing over 100 possible combinations of digital inputs, counter inputs, analogue inputs
• IP68 enclosure, suitable for submersion to 4m for 4 days with a range of mounting options for in-field deployment
• Inbuilt submersion sensor – to detect when the unit is submerged under water
• Communicates with either Medina or DNP3 Masters
• Built-in quad band GSM/GPRS modem or combined Tri-band 3G and quad band GSM/GPRS modem
• Internal antenna and optional external antenna
• Lithium battery with an expected life of 5+ years
• Flexible integrated installation bracket
• Automatic external power source detection
• Automatic switching between an internal and external antenna
• Local diagnostic points such as GSM signal strength, temperature, battery voltage
• Read data from Modbus slaves

Palette is Metasphere’s own web hosted data visualisation and management platform. With full telemetry alarming and eventing capabilities, it is a genuine alternative to ClearSCADA in the monitoring environment should Council be looking for a platform. Several water utilities, including Water Corporation in WA and Water Authority Fiji choose to have several thousand Point Orange RTUs on Palette despite having SCADA systems in place. They find Palette extremely flexible, scalable and intuitive to use.

The ‘Point Colour’ range of battery powered Remote Telemetry Units (RTUs) combine with best of breed sensors and integrate seamlessly with ClearSCADA, Mosaic and many other ‘top-end’ systems including ‘Palette’.

Palette is the web (client) interface of ‘Master Control’ which is the telemetry engine driving Palette.

Palette is a full telemetry data trending and alarming platform, which has been in operation for over 3 years, has over 3000 RTUs sending it data and is used by high profile clients including Water Corporation (flow metering), Queensland Urban Utility (sewer level monitoring) and Coates Hire and SAGE Automation (flow metering and water quality monitoring), as well Water Authority of Fiji (flow metering) and Water PNG (flow metering). ‘Master Control’, has a further 10,000 RTUs dialling into it.

Key Features of Palette:

• Tried and tested by major water sector clients;
• Robust, with a 99.9% up time service record;
• Scalable: Palette, as it exists, can handle up to 20,000 RTUs dialling in to it, but this can easily be increased when required. Proven at collecting just short of 50,000,000 current values per day – Anglian Water in the UK ‘poll’ 500,000 data points every 15 minutes using Master Control;
• Flexible: Palette allows customers to intuitively access their telemetry data; to manage their RTU estates (add new sites) and undertake configuration changes on existing sites remotely. Data can be exported for use in other applications. Access to long-term historical data, right back to the time of installation for each site is a standard feature. Most of our water utility clients also have ClearSCADA but prefer to use Palette due to its flexibility and intuitiveness;
• Simple hierarchy that allows each end user to securely access their own data and alarms, whilst also allowing an overarching client to see all sites

Palette is the web visualisation platform for Master Control, a full SCADA system consists of dedicated applications running on multiple servers in a tier 4 data centre managed by an ISO:IEC 27001:2013 certified provider of hosted services. The system architecture is designed with resilience in mind; ensuring incoming telemetry requests are serviced (time services data, current values and events) as well as ensuring alarms are enunciated to the operators.