Owing to its modularity and scalability, CultinovaEDGE™ was selected by the consortium partners to provide the sensing and control functionality operating on the the blue-green roof of the rainwater attenuation system.
A specific requirement was to provide a wireless link to a cloud-based digital twin of the roof and precision weather forecasting service provided by one of the project partners. To realise this, a Cultinova EDGE wireless datalogger was repurposed to act as a sensor hub and valve controller. Realtime tank level information is transmitted by the datalogger via the 4G/5G mobile network to the cloud-based digital twin, which is compared to estimated rainfall to predict tank levels to attenuate predicted rainfall amounts. Future valve opening setpoints are downloaded by the datalogger and stored in its memory and subsequently used to set valve positions and achieve the desired rainwater storage levels.
Furthermore, the datalogger is used to gather and transmit soil moisture and temperature data in addition to measured rainwater outflow to a web-based dashboard and provide information on the health of the blue-green roof as well as verify the accuracy the weather forecasting and hydrological digital twin.
Being modular, the configuration of the required sensor and control interfaces for the Cultinova solution was relatively straight forward. The re-purposing of the wireless data logger to provide valve control functionality was more challenging owing to the machine-to-machine communication and security requirements of the cloud-based digital twin provided by the project partner.
Once assembled, the system was evaluated on a bench setup over a period of three months using the web-based digital twin to generate a wide range of test cases. One this initial evaluation phase was complete, the system was tested on an outdoor blue-green roof scale model a subsequently installed in 2021 on a new blue-green roof that forms part of Bruntwood Estates Bloc project in central Manchester.
Based upon the success of this first installation, a number of similar blue-green roof installations have since been undertaken. Furthermore, the system is now being investigated for use as a flood mitigation measure in ground-based Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS).
