How These Rice University Students Are Building A Low-Power Flood Sensor Network

By Amit Chowdhry ● Apr 4, 2019

There is a team of senior engineering students at Rice University that are working towards helping homeowners know when a surge of floodwater is coming. The students are building a real-time and web-enabled system for monitoring flood levels in municipalities like Houston. The city of Houston suffered from three major floods in recent years along with Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

How does it work? The students created a set of wireless stations that communicate with a base for reporting on flooding at their locations. The stations include a solar-powered wireless transmitter that is able to sit at the top of a utility pole and a rubber conduit that stretches down the side — which connects the station to a water-level rain gauge and a pressure sensor. The software built into the device gathers data that is sent by remote stations and reports on what it senses.

By setting up these sensors throughout a city, it can inform authorities with the information that they need to respond to a flood in progress. The sensor nodes are set to report local conditions every five minutes, but this can be adjusted.

The city of Houston is interested and so the Houston Solutions Lab (a partnership between Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research and the city of Houston) is sponsoring the initiative that is being developed as a senior capstone project at the university’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. Rice alumna Joan Gurasich ’68 is also a sponsor of the project.

This project will be demonstrated at the annual George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase where more than 80 teams are going to compete for thousands of dollars in prizes. And it will be open to the public from 4:30PM-7PM April 11 Rice’s Tudor Fieldhouse.

The team includes Alexandra Du, Alex Kaplan, Neil Seoni, Alfonso Morera, and Kevin Wu. All of them are electrical and computer engineering majors and they are being advised by Rice professor in the practice of computer technology and electrical and computer engineering Gary Woods. Du said that the system mimics Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education & Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center for monitoring flood levels along Houston’s bayous, but with less expensive components.

“The individual sensors store and send information to a central location using radio, and that location will then parse through and send the data off through a cellular connection,” said Du. “We can then get that from any web interface.” Du’s stake in this project is personal as her family’s house in Katy, Texas got flooded during Harvey.

“We hope this will help tell first responders where there’s the most need and how to allocate their resources effectively,” added Morera.

This project started when two Rice University professors civil engineer Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio and computer scientist Devika Subramanian started to look for commercial versions of what the students developed for their projects. Woods pointed out that “Houston might want to have thousands of these” and since it should be able to scale up since it is based on Internet of Things technology — which is “getting cheaper all the time.” By the end of the spring semester, a small set of sensors are expected to be set up around the campus.