A large agroindustrial company that produces conventional sugar, organic and flavored sugars, electricity, alcohol, rice, and protein for animal feed required the implementation of sensors to monitor their water usage and availability.
Due to their scale, the water consumption in the area is key to their sustainability, and IoT solutions to monitor help them to better manage this resource.
The company is located in a dry region in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and is responsible for 59% of the cane production in the area. For them, the management and conservation of water resources in its operations are very important, they needed a way to more frequently quantify the flows and volumes of water that circulate through the network of open irrigation canals that they have. in their infrastructure, at that time they did it manually with an operator who had to travel great distances with measuring instruments to take the readings.
They also wanted to automate the reading of the water table of the irrigation wells, which varied according to the time of year and the consumption that was made of them, at that time an operator also had to go to each well to take the reading.
Finally, they were looking for better control of soil moisture in order to optimize irrigation processes and in the future correlate these variables with the productivity obtained from the harvest.
Lantern Technologies developed for them a flow sensor for open channels that takes the height of the water via an ultrasonic sensor and measures the speed with a small propeller placed inside the channel. With this, it is possible to characterize the flow of water that circulates through the tributary and send it to the analysis and visualization platform.
To measure the water table level of wells, an ultrasonic sensor was used that allows knowing the distance from the mouth of the well to the water mirror, thereby monitoring the level measurement.
Finally, using humidity sensors that measure the water tension of the soil, the company can now know the level of soil humidity that its crops handle with a sample that is taken every 12 hours and has alerts and reports of all these variables.