Smart Cities: Non Destructive Approach for Water Leakage Detection

Abstract

Natural resources management is essential, especially of water distribution within cities. In Brazil, water losses in distribution systems go up to around 38%. In the context of “Smart Cities”, technologies that use “The Internet of Things” can be applied to reduce such losses. The present article shows that leakages produce distinctive noise ranging from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz. Through digital signal processing techniques, such as the Discrete Fourier Transform and Goertzel Transform, the spectral signals are decomposed, revealing their components of frequency such as the intensity. An architecture that performs the communication between slave nodes through a TCP/IP network is then proposed. The slave nodes are responsible for data collection for leakage identification. The collected data is then sent to the data master where there is greater computing power. The data master will perform the processing according to the paradigm of edge computing, thus obtaining frequency responses and the identification of the leakage itself. It will also make data available through OPC-UA, a standard “Internet of Things” communication protocol widely used in the industrial context.