Tiiso Ramadumane, the National University of Lesotho (NUL) Research Assistant supervised by Mr Seforo Mohlalisi has developed a remote sensing system that tells you liquid level in terms of volumes in any of your storage devices, live, on your mobile-phone!
If, for instance, you are a mobile service provider, you don’t have to worry about a tower shutting down and signal running out unexpectedly due to low diesel levels.
Or maybe you are a farm, a construction site, a data centre, a warehouse, a busy government facility, a petrol station. And you store water, petrol, diesel, paraffin, milk, or any liquid for that matter, in huge volumes. It’s time to let go off all those long measuring sticks. “You just got to keep checking your cell-phone, miles away from the holding tanks,” Tiiso said.
“This system will do the work for you!”
Yep! It will also tell you the rate at which your diesel, your petrol, your water, your milk, is being used up. It will alert you through an sms or a phone call, when a liquid in a tank is about to run out so you can rush to the container and refill.
As an extra, this system is extremely accurate. “When it tells you, “only twenty litres are left in your storage, please refill,” it means “only twenty litres are left,” he said, “we have tested and retested its accuracy many times.””
Let’s try to understand the importance of this system by Tiiso.
Suppose your business service needs to be provided with electric power at all times. This is what you do. Where electric lines are available, you just tap into the nearest line to power your system. But electricity can be cut unexpectedly and you know it.
So you need to have a diesel generator as a standby. When power is cut, a generator is set on immediately and a customer hardly notices a difference in service provision (there is no lost phone signal in the case of a mobile service provider).
But the problem is, you won’t know when the power will be cut and for how long. That simply means you also won’t know how quickly your diesel tanks will need to be refilled. You end up visiting your diesel tanks periodically or at random, a strategy which surely won’t save you a couple of dollars.
In remote areas where your systems are far from power lines, you take another option. You either have just a diesel generator or both a generator and a solar panel for providing power. In such a dual system, when solar goes down, the generator gets in. But you don’t know when your solar power will be weak and for how long.
So in both cases, you still don’t know when and for how long your generator will rely on the diesel unless you go there to measure.
In any of the circumstances, you are not even sure if all the diesel was delivered to the tank in the first place. Yes, some of your naughty workers may deliver half the diesel you paid for, and take half for themselves. And you don’t know when and if an intruder came in to steal some of your diesel.
So Tiiso’s system solves all these problems. It has three components. The first component is a sensor. It senses diesel level in a surgical accuracy. Once the level is detected, it is converted into volume based on the geometry of the tank and sends the volume to a server through internet.
“Then we designed an internet accessed display system which picks data from the server to either make graphs or to show you the diesel level in real-time (or as it happens), on your mobile phone,” he said.
The graphs are important as they can give you an idea of how the level is changing over time. You can even choose your period of interest and watch the level variations in the use of the diesel. Suppose you see level drop from full to zero in 60 seconds. It could only mean someone was stealing your diesel (even though you didn’t see him).
When the diesel is about to run out (it’s up to you to decide at what volume that will be), the system no longer waits for you to check on your mobile, at your own convenient time. Rather, it sends you a message (sms).
And Tiiso has another plan, “we are considering to also make it to call you with a recorded voice message because most people respond faster to phone calls than messages.”
Then, a host of your problems are solved. And your customer is just about happy. You know because she clearly doesn’t think much about you anymore.