Publication: Development and performance evaluation of an Internet of Things enabled automated weir gate and its centralized management system
Date
2021-01
Authors
Muhammad Hafizuddin Moktar
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The water is utilized in many applications such as agriculture, farming, and
power plant cooling. It also needs to be appropriately managed to prevent wastage and
water shortage. Nowadays, the water flow is managed or controlled by using either the
water pump or watergate. In this research, watergates usage will be discussed further,
along with the other water-flow control device such as the water pump, which is also
applicable in this research case. The application of watergates is often seen in
agricultural irrigation and flood mitigation. The current challenges of watergates
management are that they are manually operated and monitored. These manual
watergates are challenging to manage and have frequent issues, including high manual
labor cost, long operation time and high accidental risk. Besides, the watergates are
scattered over a large region. It requires the worker to travel between the gates to
control and monitor it. As a result, the more watergates were used, the greater the cost
of transport and the number of workers required. In this research, a centralized water
management system was developed through the Internet of Things (IoT), and it was
evaluated through the collection of data. Three prototypes of the automated watergates
were tested both in the lab and on-site. Based on the test results, the prototypes
succeeded and achieved the targeted criteria. The developed system not only can
automate the watergates, but it can also provide the custom IoT client that can manage
multiple watergates with the collected data from multiple types of sensors and control
the gates through the IoT interface remotely. From that, the users can have a fast
monitoring work, a full picture of the gates' work, and water profile in the area.