Kielder Water & Dam Monitoring

The customer's need

To implement an IoT-based monitoring system to monitor the stability of the dam wall and the volume of water entering the reservoir from its tributaries. The whole area around the reservoir has reduced or no cell phone network coverage, and therefore the communications solution supporting the monitoring network needed to consume low power and have long durability, low maintenance and support a very reliable and secure data transfer from sensors to users.

Our solution

The Insight Platform deployed for Kielder Water & Forest Park has three key components:

• Edge-based hardware, data collection, aggregation and data transfer
• Cloud-based Insight Platform for near real-time data processing and management
• Web-based customizable dashboard for visualization of remotely collected data which has been validated, enriched, curated and securely stored.

The Insight Platform is built on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, and by virtue of its microservices architecture provides high levels of scalability, availability, security, integration, and data management to users anywhere in the world. A key element of the Insight Terra solution is the combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) services that support the Insight data management platform - within the AWS Virtual Private Cloud, Insight Terra utilises the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, Container Service for Kubernetes, Relational Database Service, Key Management Service and a number of other specialised services to enable Insight Terra to provide an agile, secure and trustworthy data management service to Kielder Water & Forest Park.

To address the need for reliable and resilient communications at this remote location, the solution also incorporates an all-weather telecommunications kiosk. The kiosk houses the edge computer node, power storage/management, LoRaWAN gateway and Inmarsat satellite terminal, and is supported by a wind-turbine and PV solar arrays for totally independent remote operation.

How is Kielder Water benefiting from our solution?

Kielder Water & Forest Park Development Trust now has real-time, continuous and detailed insight into the key critical risk control factors that might affect the integrity the dam and the surrounding environment of the reservoir and downstream catchment area, including:

• Displacement or distortion of the dam wall;
• Water levels (‘freeboard”) of all tributaries supplying water to the reservoir;
• Additionally, the status of any instrument and its associated power source is monitored and known at all times.  

Inmarsat

A UK-based global satellite communications operator that provides the resilient satellite connectivity and standalone power generation capability to this project.

Mconnected

Mconnected is an asset intelligence and IoT integration specialist that installed and integrated the geo-technical sensors, instrumentation and the telecoms kiosk at Kielder Reservoir.

Worldsensing

Worldsensing supplied the load-sensing inclinometers that measure any movement of the dam wall, and the LoRaWAN gateway that connected all the sensors, aggregating their data before transmitting it to the edge computer node for transformation and transmission to the cloud pipeline.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts the Insight Platform in its Virtual Private Cloud infrastructure.  AWS is the world’s most comprehensively and broadly adopted cloud computing service provider, offering compute, storage, databases, machine learning and AI, data lakes and analytics, and IoT services. AWS core infrastructure is flexible and secure, built to satisfy government, military and banking requirements.