Marseille Spots Clogged Gutters with Filling-level Sensors

Marseille is France's second largest city, home to the mythical OM soccer team. The coastal city is part of ex -Morseille Provence, France's largest metropole, an area known for its rosé wine, picturesque scenery, and pristine beaches. But when it rains, the beauty is replaced by this. it's a problem faced by many coastal cities to prevent this from happening gutters are often cleaned saram a subsidiary of the french utility company Suez oversees water sanitation services and infrastructure for the city and 17 surrounding towns. The agents, the operators, will visually inspect each of these avaloirs and grilles to determine if these are dirty and so curing them. Historically, it was the way to do it. The project of collecting it was built on the fact that we had As an actual obligation to make 50 ,000 visits per year of these avaloirs, we wanted to replace these visits by captures that measure the level of the waste in the avaloirs. And that's crucial because the minute those gutters overflow, rainwater can flush waste into the sea. The 1 .5 million euro project actually started as a pilot project in 2019. We did a first test on 50 avaloirs and we tested different types of captures and it allowed us to select a Marseilla startup called Green Citizen. After this test on 50 avaloirs, in 2020, there were 1000 avaloirs equipped with the captures, of course, with the aval of the Metropole Ex-Marseille Provence and with the financial aid of the Eau, Rhône-Méditerranée-Corse. On the next test. In 2021, the project has been done, we installed 3.000 points of measure, and in 2022, at the end of this year, there will be 5.000 avaloirs that are connected. This technology consists of captures to ultrasons, placed under the foundation of the avaloirs, which allows to measure, in real time, every day, the height of the waste in these avaloirs, and thus, these measurements of the height of the avaloirs. to allow us to release the dispatching of the teams to make these curations at the right place, at the right time, at the right frequency. Once completed, the project will connect 5,000 of the 20,000 gutters. This ultrasonic sensor follows the same principle as the one used in tank or waste monitoring. But considerations related to the operating conditions need to be taken into account. It is very popular in the pluviaux or in the use of the gas that we call the H2S, which is very corrosive. We also have an equipment. As we say, when the gas is charged, the capter is submerged. It is based on equivalent technologies, but with very durable equipment. The sensors operate on a Sigfox network. We're told that it allows for the sensors to last for up to 10 years without a battery replacement. And despite the recent troubles Sigfox has faced related to its bankruptcy filing, the project's not compromised because… On the Métropole de Marseille, SIPFOX has been a good partner with a good cover density. We have collaborated with them on the Métropole de Marseille. We also deploy LoRa solutions. The information captured by the sensors is sent to Ceram Control Room at Lafar, where the utility monitors the entire water sanitation. network. The connected gutter's data is visualized on a dedicated platform, the Humbox, by Green Citizen. On this screen, the different connected gutters' locations and their statuses are displayed in different colors. This screen displays the historical fill level of a single connected gutter to better understand the patterns. On this graph, every drop could represent a cleaning operation or a rain that washed out the content of the gutter. The same information is also accessible on mobile devices by the teams on the ground. All the data gathered by the connected gutters is then centralized in Suez Aqua Advanced Urban Drainage, a real -time software system for sewage network monitoring and control. It can predict floods, control the quality of discharges into the receiving environment, and optimize to current regulatory and treatment facilities. At the same time, the system is processing meteorological data and information from various sensors on the sewage system. It's now been three years since the start of the Smart Gutter project, and a minor limitation The only inconvenience is the typical typology of the Valor. If the Valor is not adapted to the post of a capter, we can't put it. For the moment, because we test other solutions. But at the moment, our only constraint is the typology of the Valor. After the capter, if it is placed on the top of the capter, we can't put it on the top of the capter. However, the benefits are valuable, considering that the utility was able to drastically limit the amount of physical inspections. In 2022, we will practically reduce all of the visits. We will not only do surveillance by supervision. And this is just the beginning. Saran plans to continue to experiment with IoT technology in the future. Tomorrow and in 2022, we will also be under surveillance the canalizations that cause problems of cooperation. So tomorrow, it will be... Green Citizen announcing that it too plans to deploy more solutions in 12 other towns in the first semester of 2022, a demand that seems to be fueled by an increase in interest in ecology-related solutions in Europe. It's been five or six years now that we are on these issues of environmental issues, and now we have felt a break. That is, where the subject of the environment came like a snake on the cake, now it's actually a subject number one. I think it's also linked to public incitations. 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