As the digital-water.city project enters its final months, what have our DWC partners in Berlin been up to?

Our Berlin teams have been busy testing digital-water.city technology to find illicit sewer connections. They have been screening hotspots in the stormwater catchment area and spotting illicit connections with the distributed temperature sensing (DTS) technology.  

In addition, all online devices for combined sewer overflow (CSO) monitoring have been installed and XPection monitoring was carried out for different operational applications like sewer cleaning, observation of damages or precleaning.  

Our partners from Vragments have partly developed the functional prototypes for their 2 digital solutions, the well diary application and the mobile app Making groundwater visible. Workshops will be organised to define further features of the well diary app both with potential users and with stakeholders to get feedback on the mobile application. 

According to our experts, one of the most challenging digital solutions is sensors in sewers. They often aren’t robust enough to face these difficult, corrosive environments. Sensors can get lost or the data transmission can be disrupted. If that happens, data might be lost or the availability of data can be delayed. Therefore, sensors require more maintenance than other digital solutions.

One of the key learnings of 2021 is that resources can be saved by adapting the data logged and transferred to the actual demand. Also, our Berlin researchers learnt that the devil is in the details and that it takes a long time to finish a functional prototype.  

Before the end of the project, they expect to collect as much data as possible from temperature sensors to get a dataset of all the CSOs. They would also like to see the solution of sensors and smart analytics transferred from the research department to the operational team at BWB.  

We wish them all the luck!