Intelligent Drainage Management Systems

Protect urban areas and the environment by preventing flooding.

Reduce Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO) and improve wastewater quality

Under heavy rain conditions, flooding of urban areas and polluted water discharges into water bodies is a real risk. Storm flows usually exceed sewer capacity and Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) – initially designed for dry weather conditions – may discharge contaminated effluent.

The issue has been exacerbated by urban development as the increase of impervious surfaces increases runoff and leads to higher peak flows. ADASA’s drainage management systems use several strategies to maximise wastewater retention at treatment plants and minimise flooding and discharges to the environment during storm episodes.

Cities with significant retention capacity requirements constructed storage facilities or retention basins, also known as wet weather storage, to mitigate flooding and CSOs. They act as an off-grid buffer during periods of heavy rainfall; efficient operation of these complex infrastructures is of great importance.

Our systems consist of several levels of control:

Manual and local.
Manual and remote.
Local control, with logic and data measured by sensors at the storage facility.
Global control, encompassing data from the whole network.

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Manual levels help with maintenance and operations such as sediment removal using flushing systems. Other control systems, such as odour control, are often implemented, too. All actuators return to a safety position in case of a power outage or lack of command.

Local control includes data measured at the facility, like network flows and rainfall and can incorporate data measured at nearby facilities if communications exist.

Global control uses optimisation techniques to compute the best strategy in near real-time. It takes into account treatment capacity, the topology/capacity of the collection system, measured rainfall and measured flows.

Next, it sends commands to the actuators, e.g. gates and pumps, to regulate both the inflow and the outflow during the storm event, continuing to issues commands after the event and until the retention basin is emptied. Global control requires communication with all the collection system facilities and a mechanism to activate a lower level of control in case of failure.

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