AL WASIA WATER WELLS PROJECT – KSA

Key Features:

Water is a vital source of life for not only humans but also for all forms of life on this planet. And although 71% of the earth is water, only 2.5% of this water is fresh and suitable for human use.This creates growing demands on providing water through desalination and taking advantage of groundwater, besides the water treatment process.

To meet those demands, the construction of water stations is a must. And companies will need to utilize different technologies to perform efficiently and take advantage of every resource available.
Water wells are structures created in the ground using different methods such as digging, driving, and drilling to enable access to the groundwater. This groundwater is transported from one place to another through pumping stations and other equipment. Therefore a secure and reliable communication method is required between the pumps, equipment and water wells.

The Challenges

• Providing a communication solution between water wells which were less than 3 km apart.
• A secure and reliable communication link.
• Not affected by high temperature and humidity.
• Achieving high throughput to handle high data rates.
• Supporting Modbus to offer backward compatibility with SCADA.

The Solution


After a number of detailed site surveys,
Xceltra decided to provide Giza Systems with the M2M remote Wireless solution to be installed for Saudi national water company (NWC). This decision was made based on the following factors:

• Using the wired solutions wasn’t an option, as it suffers from humidity and affected by water.
• Since the distance between the sites didn’t require huge transmission power, 2.4GHZ modems were picked over low frequency modems.

The designed solution consisted of wireless radios, as it met the project requirement through the following features:

• License free reducing the operation cost.
• Offered flexibility with Ethernet and serial ports
• Support several encryption protocols for secure communication
• Range up to 10 Km @ 400 mW, which fits perfectly in the project as the distances between the wells was < 3km
• Deterministic AP to AP mesh network repeatability allowing the increase of the range , multiple channel options and increasing network scalability.
• Fits the use in outdoor environment with a wide Range of operating temperature from –40 to +60 °C and the ability to operate reliably in humidity from 0 to 99 % RH
• The ability to support Modbus communication protocol which eliminates the need of extra hardware to communicate with the SCADA.
• Over-the-air network diagnostics and configuration to simplify accesses to this huge network.

Success Stories