Newcastle City (Australia) is currently building a 2.7km Light Rail project, linking the Newcastle Interchange in Wickham to Pacific Park in the city. As part of the civil infrastructure works, sewer services will be disrupted, so large sewer tanks are being used, and a requirement exists to pump sewerage from one point to another. Hence, large sewer bypass pumps were obtained from Coates Hire to manage the sewer requirements.
During the project, the project managers and other staff needed to remotely monitor the sewer pump activity. They also needed to know immediately when the sewer tank is nearly full. Real time monitoring was critical – if a pump failed to operate, it would create significant environmental problems.
Coates Hire engaged AVE Technologies to set up and integrate 2 SMS alerting systems. The first system was to report the status of the pumps (running or stopped), plus power outage alerts. The second system was for the large sewer tank, to send an alert when the tank was almost full to capacity.
Requirements
- 2 systems to send SMS alerts to multiple recipients when dry contact inputs change state.
- The unit must be ‘industrial grade’, suitable for a high vibration environment.
- The SMS unit must operate on the current generation mobile networks (4G) and not be locked in to a specific vendor.
- The system must be capable of sending different messages to multiple and individual recipients.
- The SMS controller’s input triggers need to be easily interfaced to the pumps’ engine control system (preferably using dry contacts).
- The system should have a battery backup built in so it can alert people of power loss events.
- The system should not rely on “The Cloud” for configuration (prefer configurable by RS-232 as well as by sending configuration messages via SMS).
Solution
The CyberVisuell CYCON-1280-4G-BB SMS controller was chosen for the SMS alerting system, it met all the requirements. CyberVisuell is a popular industrial electronic equipment brand exclusively distributed by Esis in Australia. Two CYCON units were supplied by Esis, to control SMS alerting for the pumps and the sewer tank. AVE Technologies integrated these into weatherproof enclosures with an industrial power supply, and an external antenna.
For the sewer pumps, the unit’s dry contact inputs were wired into the engine controller of the pumps. For the sewer tank monitor, the CYCON-1280-4G’s inputs were connected to a float switch in the tank.
The CYCON-1280-4G offered simplicity of configuration, using easy SMS commands. It also offered the convenience of updating message recipients and changing messages remotely by SMS, which saved staff from making extra site visits.
Each unit was programmed to send SMS to up to 6 recipients. However some recipients only wanted to know the status of the pump, while others also needed the power supply failure alerts and tank levels. Hence the CYCON-1280-4G’s “recipient groups” feature was used to send different messages to different groups of recipients.
Results
The system worked as designed, typically generating about 10 – 16 SMS events during each day depending on the duty cycle of the sewer bypass pump.
During system integration, AVE Technologies identified a flaw in the assembly of the CYCON-1280-4G, whereby the battery was not held tightly inside the enclosure. This was immediately rectified by Esis in Sydney, and measures have been taken at Esis’ assembly workshop to prevent it happening again.
In addition to the project managers, Coates hire staff also monitored all SMS events. This proved fortunate, as they remotely diagnosed a failure with a float switch as the pump was switching on and off too frequently.
Customer Comments
“Delivery of items was as promised. The CYCON was very easy to configure & integrate with ancillary equipment. Supplied documentation was easy to comprehend. The equipment has been functioning satisfactorily working in harsh environments. I would recommend them to anyone requiring an industrial rated product.”
– Peter Kutas, AVE Technologies
