Congratulations Jude D’Cruz, Ivan Di Giusto, Matthew Henderson and Arjun Narang
June 2013, a total system failure of the Kurnell Vacuum Sewer in South Sydney Australia, resulted in the loss of wastewater services for hundreds of customers. After restoring the system, Ventia was engaged to trial innovative, cost effective ways to prevent further system failure.
First, our water business partnered with our client and with Vianet, our Internet of Things business to identify, isolate and fix location based faults along the sewer system. By doing this, they were able to improve the overall performance and robustness of the Kurnell system.
Next, over a period of six months, the Vianet technical team went through a progressive prototyping process to develop a Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology device which would deliver better functionality than the industry standard solution.
The result – a vacuum sewer monitoring device, which uses an inbuilt LoRaWAN radio to collect data and send fault alerts to field crews through a hand-held device.
In addition to having longer lifespan – over 10 years on a single A-size battery – the new device costs less to install and operate delivering an 85 percent saving on a whole-of-life cost basis. This has made it economically feasible to deploy vacuum sewer monitoring over an entire network.
Pictured (left to right): Matthew Henderson, Arjun Narang, Ivan Di Giusto and Jude D’Cruz with the vacuum sewer monitoring device.
