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USenSewer: Ultrasonic Sensor and GSM-Arduino

Based Automated Sewerage Management

Conference Paper · September 2017

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 USenSewer: Ultrasonic Sensor and GSM-Arduino
Based Automated Sewerage Management
Sajedul Talukder Md. Iftekharul Islam Sakib Zahidur Rahim Talukder Upoma Das Arnob Saha
Florida Int’l University BUET BUET BUET BUET
Miami, Florida, USA Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh Dhaka, Bangladesh
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Nur Sultan Nazar Bayev

BUET
Dhaka, Bangladesh
[email protected]

Abstract—This paper presents the design and prototype im- of Dhaka city are congested in many places and as a result the
plementation of USenSewer, an automated sewerage manage- flow in the drain is obstructed heavily. This often results in the
ment system that uses Arduino microcontroller coupled with overflow of the drain water over the roads and residential areas
an ultrasonic sensor, a NRF module and a GSM module to
automate the routine checkup and removal of drain blockage causing a serious problem in the daily life of the city dwellers.
vital for the continuous waste water flow in the big cities. The Moreover, the city of Dhaka was particularly hit by the floods
proposed system consists of three main components; the blockage of past several years, some of which such as the ones in 1988
detection system which is placed inside the drain, the blockage and 1998 were catastrophic with flood levels of up to 4.5m
removal system which is placed above the ground level and a in parts of the city. Particularly, about 56 percent of the city
control center which controls and coordinates the collection of
waste materials placed by the first two components. Several pilot was inundated during the 1998 flood which shows the poor
installations of the system in the city of Dhaka have shown that sewerage system of the city [4]. The government has taken
the proposed system significantly outperforms the state-of-the- several projects to improve the sewerage system in the capital
art manual systems prevailing in the city from the scalability, and bring other big cities like Chittagong and Khulna under
flexibility and economic point of view. similar system of sewerage network, but these initiatives fell
short to cope with the problems existing in those cities [5],
I. I NTRODUCTION
[6]. Additionally, there is a lack of sufficient resources and
Sewer and drain management system is a fundamental manpower in the city corporation authority to check the
part of city management. This is also important to prevent drain blockage and remove the obstructions from the jammed
congestion of dirty water, rain water etc. We have chosen the points [7]. Although routine checkup and removal of drain
sewerage system of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh to blockage is needed for continuous waste water flow, it turns
design USenSewer, our proposed automated sewerage man- out to be expensive and tedious for authorities with limited
agement system. Bangladesh is one of the most populated resources. In this perspective, it is impossible to manage the
countries in the world where the sanitation problem is acute drain system manually with the help of insufficient resources
in the urban areas especially in the big cities like Dhaka, the of the city corporation. Our motivation is to develop a micro-
capital of Bangladesh and a city with 20 million inhabitants. controller based automatic system to manage the drainage
The sewerage management of a city like Dhaka is not an easy system of the city so that the obstructions in the citys drains
task and requires enormous efforts to manage the drainage can be removed automatically.
system to keep the city suitable for living [1]. Moreover, This paper aims to automate blockage detection and
there exists numerous challenges such as flooding, poor service temporary waste removal process to reduce workload and
quality, groundwater depletion, inadequate sanitation, polluted ensure proper water flow. Researchers have tried to design
river water, unplanned urban development, and the existence automatic drain water monitoring and analysis technology [8],
of large slums where more than one third of its population investigated applying of SPC (Statistical Process Control) in
lives, a good example being the city of Dhaka. Residents of the sewage treatment system [9], tried vacuum sewer system
Dhaka enjoy one of the lowest sewerage tariffs in the world, management by IP sensing [10], proposed a network of
which limits the authority’s capacity to invest in sewerage controllable sewage sumps having pumps and level detection
management. The service area of Dhaka Water Supply and equipment to permit controlled flow of sewage to a central
Sewer Authority (DWASA) covers more than 360 square km treatment facility [11] or used event-driven model predictive
with a population of about 12 million [2]. But unfortunately, control of sewage pumping stations [12]. However, only a
the drainage management system of this capital city is not few of the above mentioned methods achieved the desired
well planned and not at all organized [3]. Most of the drains success. None of the researchers proposed microcontroller
based solution coupled with an ultrasonic sensor, NRF
module and GSM module to automate the routine checkup
and removal of drain blockage. To the best of our knowledge,
this paper is the first attempt to use a microcontroller based
solution to design a fully automated sewerage management
system.

Our Contributions. This paper presents the following contri-

butions:
• Automatic blockage detection system. Design and im-
plement an automatic blockage detection system that is
placed inside the drain.
• Automatic blockage removal system. Design and im-
plement an automatic blockage removal system that is
placed above ground level outside the drain. Fig. 1. System Diagram
• GSM based coordination and control. Design and
implement a GSM based coordination and control mecha- Some works have been done on the automation of manual
nism that is vital for the management of sewerage system systems using Arduino microcontroller and GSM. Adriansyah
by the city authority. and Baraka [21], [22] propose design of smart home automa-
• Pilot installation and evaluation. Install some pilot tion system based on Arduino. Teslyuk et al. [23] present
prototypes in various points of the sewerage system of the structure of control system of Arduino microcontroller
Dhaka city and evaluate the performance of the proposed and Android device based greenhouse, describe features of
solution against the state-of-the-art manual system. developed software and physical model based on the Arduino
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II microcontroller using Android device. Wensi et al. [24] present
describes the background of the work. Section III describes the a new system for remote monitoring using GSM wireless data
Stochastic Game Petri Net (SGPN). Section IV analyzes the transmission system. Kumar et al. [25] designs an Arduino
previous works. Section V shows how SGPN is represented. based wireless intrusion detection using IR sensor and GSM.
Section VI and VII present the attack modeling and defense Zaghloul [26] presents the practical design and implemen-
modeling respectively. Section VIII evaluates our proposed tation of professional tool using GSM-GPRS Arduino Shield
models and analyze the findings. Finally, Section IX concludes (GS-001) with SIM 900 chip module in wireless data transmis-
the paper with a highlight on the scope of future work. sion system for data acquisition and control of power induction
melting furnace. Several other researchers use GSM-GPRS
II. R ELATED W ORK Arduino for smart energy metering and billing system [27],
Several techniques on management of sewerage system have design of a communication system [28] and data acquisition
been proposed in recent years. Müller et al. [13] report of the system [29].
development of an automatic control strategy to manage the However, the aforementioned technologies suffer various
wastewater flow to a WwTP according to its actual treatment shortcomings and are not sufficient enough to deal with the
capacity. Brandstetter et al. [14] present a comprehensive numerous challenges that exist with the sewerage management
mathematical model (Urban Wastewater Management Model) of a city like Dhaka. A comprehensive yet modern approach is
to continuously simulate time-varying wastewater flows and needed to deal with the existing problems. This paper proposes
qualities in complex metropolitan combined sewerage systems. a new approach to use a microcontroller based solution to
Guo-ping et al. [15] presents the automatic monitoring and design a fully automated sewerage management system.
supervision system for pollution sources.
Much work has been done on detection of moving ob- III. S YSTEM M ODEL
stacles using ultrasonic sensors on both air medium and The mechanical body of USenSewer consists of a primary
water medium. Petillot et al. [16] describe the tracking of net responsible for filtering the waste materials coming with
underwater objects and motion estimation by proposing a new the drain water, a lifting platform responsible for storing and
framework for segmentation of sonar images. They apply this removing the waste materials and a backup net to temporarily
framework to the design of an obstacle avoidance and path hold the waste materials from passing through while the lifting
planning system for underwater vehicles based on a multi- platform is busy with removing the already accumulated waste
beam forward looking sonar sensor. Similarly, Ohya et al. [17] materials. The primary net is placed vertically with the ground
design autonomous mobile robot which can detect moving where a waterproof ultrasonic sensor is attached in a desired
obstacles in air medium with ultrasonic sensors. Crowley, height up to which we want the wastes to accumulate. The
Borenstein and Elfes [18]–[20] design sonar-based mapping lifting platform is placed horizontally in the ground making
and navigation system for autonomous mobile robot operating an angle of 90 degree with the primary net. The backup net is
in unknown and unstructured environments. placed horizontally above the ground which is attached with a
servo motor. There is a pair of lifting thread that are attached
with the lifting platform which are responsible for moving the
lifting platform upwards and downwards by the help of a DC
motor. An Arduino Uno board with PCBs, NRF module and
GSM module are placed above the ground which work for
the automation of the system. In summary, we have used the
following materials in order to implement our system.
• Arduino Uno
• NRF module 24L01
• Waterproof Ultrasonic Sensor HC SR04
• Servo Motor
• DC motor
• GSM module Sim 900
• 9V battery Fig. 2. Blockage detection system circuit
• Wires

A. System Components
USenSewer consists of three main components; the
blockage detection system which is placed inside the drain,
the blockage removal system which is placed above the
ground level and a control center which controls and
coordinates the collection of waste materials placed by the
first two components. We now detail each of the components.

Blockage Detection System. The blockage detection system

consists of an Arduino Uno board coupled with a NRF
module, an ultrasonic sensor and a servo motor along with its
power supply. The waste water flows through the drain and
the waste materials coming with the water are accumulated Fig. 3. Blockage removal system circuit
in the lifting platform. The ultrasonic sensor is mounted on
the primary net at a threshold height which measures the the GSM module. The manpower from the city corporation is
distance of the object in front it in almost real time by the then informed and they collect and remove the waste materials
pulse-echo techniques. As the waste material piles up and from the waste container.
crosses a certain height, the ultrasonic Sensor detects the
waste obstruction and triggers the NRF module and the servo IV. C IRCUIT D IAGRAMS AND A RDUINO C ODES
motor. The NRF module then transfers the blockage data to A. Blockage Detection
the blockage removal system while the servo motor drives the Blockage Detection Arduino Code
backup net to place vertically so that further waste doesn’t
get onto the lifting platform. After the platform removes the // BlockageDetection.c
//NRF Transmitter
waste, the backup net is moved back to its original horizontal #include <Servo.h>
position to open up the flow path again.

Blockage Removal System. The blockage removal system

consists of a GSM module and a DC motor. The blockage
detection circuit receives the data from the NRF module
whenever the waste material piles up and crosses a certain
height. The DC motor, guided by a track lifts the platform
containing waste materials to ground level with the help of
lifting thread and pours the wastage on a waste container
placed outside the drain. The lifting platform is moved back
to its position after the removal of the wastes is complete.
Finally, the GSM module sends a text message informing the
control center that a pile of wastes has been removed.

Control Center. The control center has the people working

for the city authority who receives the text message sent by
Fig. 4. USenSewer prototype
 Fig. 5. Blockage detection circuit

Fig. 7. Blockage removal circuit

digitalWrite(trigpin,HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(10);
digitalWrite(trigpin,LOW);
duration = pulseIn(echopin,HIGH);
distance = duration*.034/2;
Serial.print("Distance: ");
Serial.println(distance);
if (distance <=5 && distance >=0)
{
const char text[] = "Hello World";
flag=1;
//radio.write(&text, sizeof(text));
radio.write(&flag, sizeof(unsigned long));
delay(5000);
for(pos1 = 0 ; pos1 <90 ; pos1=pos1+1)
Fig. 6. Blockage detection PCB layout {
myservo.write(pos1);
delay(10);
#include <SPI.h> }
#include <nRF24L01.h> delay(10000);
#include <RF24.h> for(pos1=90 ; pos1 >0 ; pos1=pos1-1)
RF24 radio(7, 8); {
const byte rxAddr[6] = "00001"; myservo.write(pos1);
unsigned long flag=0; delay(10);
//Sonar } } }
const int trigpin=2;
const int echopin=3;
long duration; B. Blockage Removal
int distance;
Servo myservo; Blockage Removal Arduino Code
int pos1=0;
void setup() { // BlockageRemoval.c
// put your setup code here, to run once: #include <SPI.h>
pinMode(trigpin,OUTPUT); #include <nRF24L01.h>
pinMode(echopin,INPUT); #include <RF24.h>
Serial.begin(9600); RF24 radio(7, 8);
myservo.attach(9); const byte rxAddr[6] = "00001";
radio.begin(); int timesTosend = 1;
radio.setRetries(15, 15); int count = 0;
radio.openWritingPipe(rxAddr); char phoneno[]="0123456789";
radio.stopListening(); int led=13;
} const int Forward =2;
void loop() { const int Backward=3;
// put your main code here, to run repeatedly: void setup() {
digitalWrite(trigpin,LOW); // put your setup code here, to run once:
delayMicroseconds(2); while (!Serial);
 digitalWrite(Forward,LOW);
digitalWrite(Backward,LOW);
delay(20000);
digitalWrite(Forward,LOW);
digitalWrite(Backward,HIGH);
delay(20000);
digitalWrite(Forward,LOW);
digitalWrite(Backward,LOW);
delay(20000);
}
else
{
Serial.println("USenSewer");
digitalWrite(Forward,LOW);
digitalWrite(Backward,LOW);
delay(2000);
}}}
Fig. 8. Blockage removal PCB layout
V. E VALUATION
Serial.begin(9600);
radio.begin(); We have implemented the prototype of USenSewer and
radio.openReadingPipe(0, rxAddr); installed it at several points in the Dhaka city’s sewerage
radio.startListening(); system. The average cost for the implementation of the system
Serial.begin(9600); was around 3,500 BDT (approximately 43 USD) and cost of
delay(2000); maintenance of the system was also very low (see table I). We
delay(2000);
} have also used a temporary control center which simulated the
void loop() { action of the actual control center being used in the city. The
// put your main code here, to run repeatedly: system has run successfully without any major drawbacks. Our
if (radio.available()) research suggests that we need to install 20 systems to cover
{ per square km area which would cost approximately 70,000
char text[32] = {0};
char text2[32]="Hello World"; BDT, most of which is an one time cost. After the initial instal-
unsigned long flag=0; lation is complete, we only need the maintenance cost which
//radio.read(&text, sizeof(text)); would be much negligible in comparison to the installation
radio.read(&flag, sizeof(unsigned long)); cost. On the other hand, the state-of-the-art manual system
Serial.println(flag); that now exists in the city would cost at least 30,000 BDT
if(flag)
{ monthly to maintain the same city area we mentioned [30].
pinMode(led,OUTPUT); A quick calculation shows us that our system will outperform
digitalWrite(led,HIGH); the manual system just in over 2 months. After that point,
delay(500); our system will continue to save the expenditure that would
digitalWrite(led,LOW); otherwise be needed if there were the manual system.
delay(500);
// while(count < timesTosend) Moreover, our system is very flexible to replace or re-
//{ position in any time based on the current need. It is possible
Serial.println("AT+CMGF=1"); to replace any defective system very quickly without causing
delay(1500); much interruption in the sewerage management system. Ad-
Serial.print("AT+CMGS=\""); ditionally, the system is very much scalable as we can use as
Serial.print(phoneno);
Serial.println("\""); many system as needed without bothering the capacity of the
while(Serial.read()!=’>’); control center. Overall, our system outperforms the existing
{ manual system over many folds in various dimensions.
Serial.print("hello");
//delay(500); VI. C ONCLUSIONS
Serial.write(0x1A); Our proposed USenSewer is a starting prototype of the
Serial.write(0x0D);
Serial.write(0x0A); actual system as time and resource constraints limited the
delay(5000); primary model set up. The waste detection system might be
} upgraded to create a 2D or 3D mapping compared to the
// count++; 1D mapping used in this case. The lifting platform can be
//} powered by a much powerful motor and the sluice gate may
delay(3000);
digitalWrite(Forward,HIGH); be designed to improve primary waste filtering. The overall
digitalWrite(Backward,LOW); system needs to be rugged and water resistant for use in
delay(20000); all sorts of environments. For continuous standalone power
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