The Legionella bacteria is a well-known source of health hazards in water supply systems. In the Netherlands, but also in other countries, a series of related incidents over the last years have led to increasingly strict legislation (amongst others national guideline BRL6010) in order to prevent these health hazard situations.

In the Netherlands around 800 people are admitted to hospitals for Legionalla infection every year and the official legionella related death rate is 80. Moreover this number is suspected to be underrated as it are especially the elderly that are physically vulnerable.

Building owners have a legal obligation to minimize the risk of Legionella growth. Refreshing the water in the piping is a simple but effective measure for this. There are however many situations where it is difficult to ascertain that water in piping is sufficiently refreshed as a result of everyday use. A typical case are sports facilities where showers are used irregularly and often not every day In practice this means that all these showers must be flushed manually on a regular basis in many occasions by volunteers. This also involves making measurements and logging the data as evidence of proper maintenance. This has grown to be a costly practice estimated at 10-20 € per week per shower.

Our partner/client company Aqua Assistance is involved in Legionella prevention services and products and have cdeveloped a concept where an automatic flush unit can be retrofitted in existing shower cabins. This unit can flush selectively depending on actual usage of the shower and water temperature. A vital aspect of the system is that it is connected to central back office where the proper functioning of the system can be monitored and performance reports according to legal standards can be generated. This leads to a considerable reduction of maintenance and administrative costs while increasing reliability of service.

Van Mierlo Ingenieursbureau is a design bureau specializing in Intelligent Electronics for Measurement and Control. For this particular client and concept we intend to design and implement the electronics and software at various levels. Being involved in the development of the MyriaNed selforganizing IoT protocol we have much expertise in the local network at “site-level”. In this Industrial experiment we however want to extend and deepen our expertise towards gateway, server and (web-) interface technology. In this way we will be able to offer our clients the full suite of IoT components, from embedded device to back end systems, data aggregation and user’s dashboard interfaces.

The result of the Industrial Experiment will be a setup of two separate locations with 10 units each, connected through mobile internet to a remote back office server. System managers and end users will be provided with maintenance views on the system and report generation functions. As CPS platform we intend to use Intel’s Galileo system for the gateway and Intel’s SE 2000 for the embedded devices.

Flush units, flush sensors and gateway