 Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to another one of HydroTera's webinar series. Today we're talking about leachate management and we're going to touch on automated monitoring and control and show you some examples of that. We're also going to talk a little bit about the implications of the new EPA Act on leachate management and where we think that may affect some of the things that we're dealing with today. All right, so next slide. So before we get started, just a little bit on why we do these webinars. It's really about generating awareness of our knowledge. I suppose sharing our knowledge and also the knowledge of some of our technology suppliers and how that sort of technology can be applied. We do enjoy training our clients and that's a big part of what we do here. Really, we're trying to pass on knowledge on how technology can be used to help yourselves with what you do. It's a two-way interaction, though. So in terms of what we really love getting out of this is those questions at the end. So we better understand your needs in the industry. There's no such thing as too much communication. So really looking forward to hearing your questions at the end. All right, so today is what we've called 101 on leachate management. I will talk a little bit about the EPA Act, the 2017 one and the change that we see happening there and a bit on what we think the future of leachate management might look like. And then we're going to talk in that context about the application of sensors and automation in leachate management and how that may well help with compliance in the new regime. Who have we got here today? Well, we've got three people, one who's not on this slide, but we've got myself. I've got a background in hydrogeology and worked in environmental consulting for several years, including some auditing around landfills, that sort of thing. Yix, our senior project engineer, he has a strong background in electronic engineering and he configures a lot of our automated systems. And we've also got Dom in here today as well. So Dom assists Yix with these integrated systems. So sorry, Dom, you didn't make this slide. In the background, we've got Michelle, who is keeping us on track with the webinar. If you have a question, which we're certainly hoping you do, the Q&A button, the top of the screen there is how you can type in your questions at the end of the webinar towards the end of the webinar. We will read out those questions and attempt to answer them. If we can't answer them at the time, we will come back to you with an email response. But we'd better get into this. All right, so as most of you would be aware, the Environment Protection Act is changing. At the moment, we're still on the old regime, so I thought I'd just put that in front of us to realise we still have about a month and a half to go. We've been operating under the 1970 Act for a long time now, and we're all having to get used to a new regime. From talking to various people in the industry, I sense that we're going to go through a fairly slow transition, and there'll be a fair bit of understanding from the regulator as we all get up to speed with it. Things won't change dramatically in some instances. Some of these references in front of us will still be relevant, particularly the Beppham, which is that citing design operation and rehabilitation of landfill's document. The licensing guidelines will, however, change. So what's the change really mean? Well, some of these, most of these slides have got off publications on the EPA website. And if you do want to get more detail, there is a wealth of information there. That slide on the left, though, looking at where we are now, is the sort of navy blue slide pointing left. And the emphasis of those regulations really was consequence-based. So if you polluted, you had to fix up, right? So it was about managing pollution, and we had all those things, all those mechanisms there to make people clean up. The problem with that is it's all reactive and we can operate in a bad way without actually causing exceedances until the problem's too late. So EPA thought, let's look at a different way. And so the new act is a lot more around prevention. And this is really very relevant to this talk today on lead chain management. So it's about having systems to reduce the risk to the environment and human health. So what's the difference in emphasis here is, well, you must maintain those systems under the new regime. You can be fine for not keeping those systems operational, right? Regardless of the impact. So it's important to understand that. So we are now in a sort of prevention-based world as of July 1. Nick's sort of slide over, that sort of shows the split of how we used to do it in offence to cause pollution to land, water and air. And we had the state environmental protection policies and the waste management policies. Under the new regime, we talk about this general environmental duty, or the GED, which is really our obligation as humans and as organisations to minimise our risk to the human health and environment from pollution and waste. So what does this mean? Well, we need to show that we're doing all things reasonable to actually achieve that. And that means we need to be able to show the regulator that we are actually running our systems in accordance with how they were designed. We're maintaining them in accordance with manufacturer's guidance, for example. These things become very important when you move into a prevention-based mindset. In terms of the actual framework, we now have, if we're looking at the bottom one there, this regime of classification, transport and a lawful place. Well, landfills are a lawful place to deposit waste, OK? Now, if you're already a licensed facility, then it's most likely that you will still be at that highest level of permission, which is a licence under the new scheme. So that's that last slide on the right. But I would urge you to read up on this on the EPA side. There's plenty of documentation there. We don't have enough time today to go into too much detail. All right, so having said that, I will talk about it a bit more. So the new laws introduce a duty focused on prevention called the general environmental duty. This duty requires you to take reasonably practicable steps to eliminate or reduce the risks of harm to people and the environment from pollution and waste. So of course, the really big words there are reasonably practicable. What does that mean? This means when the new laws take effect, you will need to proactively manage the risks of harm as well as deal with the impacts of pollution and waste up they have occurred. So what's important there is it's not like the old world stops. We still need to deal with pollution, right? But what we also need to do on top of that is deal with the prevention piece. And there's a lot more focus on that. What's important to note that a breach of the general environmental duty could lead to civil or criminal penalties if you are a business or conducting an undertaking, even if harm has not occurred. So that's what I referred to before. So you need to show that you're doing the right things and you need to show that by I think monitoring and documentation as well as actually doing it. OK, I mentioned before I think that every license issued by EPA Victoria requires a license holder to have in place a risk management and monitoring program. This enables the license holder and EPA to determine compliance with the general environmental duty. So what does that mean? It means there'll be various measures in our leachate management systems and our environmental systems more generally on landfills where we will have metrics that measure the compliance with the operation of those systems. So they might be measures like leachate level on top of the liner, or they might be maintenance records to show that we're maintaining such things. So there'll be different lines. They've actually put some pretty big penalties around not complying with this. And those numbers are there in front of you. I think we're going to see that that will certainly help us to focus more. This range aims a lot more in line with the OH&S Act. And we've seen a transformation in how OH&S has been dealt with since they brought in some of those penalties. That's certainly going to get the attention of site operators. Within that act, there's a license condition, not within the act, but in the licenses, the standard license conditions. OLG5 states, you must develop a risk management and monitoring program for your activities, which identify all the risks of harm to human health and environment, which may arise from the activities you are engaging in. Clearly define your environmental performance objectives. Clearly define your risk control performance objectives. Describe how the environmental and risk control performance objectives are being achieved. Identifies and describes how you will continue to eliminate or minimize the risks as far as reasonably practicable. Describe how the information collated in compliance with this clause is or will be disseminated. So what does all that mean? It means really the framework for how you're going to report back on the success of your measures to protect the environment. OK, so it's how you're going to report on the performance of the various infrastructure that you have in place, for example, whether it's lead shape pumps or sumps or anything else. So it's a really good idea. OK, so this I've sort of stepped back and tried to say, well, how does the world change? Well, the world changes really in that they've identified these four steps, you know, identify hazards. We've been doing that for a long time. We've identified risks for a long time, but we haven't really done the last two very well, which is implement controls and check controls. That's really where the emphasis of this new act is is going to make a big difference to our lives. OK, so if we look at the Bebham, remembering that the Bebham still sort of referenced into the new regime. Not much will change in terms of hazards identified identification. So when we look at lead shape management and treatment of lead shape. The key goal is to prevent it from escaping into surface waters or groundwater, prevent offensive odors off site and minimize human contact with lead shape. So that doesn't really change. So a lot of the stuff that's been worked up over the years and in various licenses, et cetera, is still very relevant. With respect to stormwater, we try to make sure we segregate the stormwater, the lead shape and the groundwater. We try to reuse it on site where it's practicable. We try to minimize any discharges to surface waters and we try to prevent waste discharges to surface waterways so we don't affect their water quality in terms of lead shape itself. We need to have landfill cells to minimize the risk to groundwater by utilizing a liner, the lead shape collection system and the lead shape extraction system. We'll talk about some examples of that soon. We also need a liner to avoid groundwater ingress into waste. You know, you can have situations where that occurs. With respect to lead shape ponds, we want to be able to contain the lead shape. We want to try and evaporate it and we certainly want to prevent off site migration. With respect to lead shape disposal systems, we're really talking about options such as off site bassoor, on site treatment plants or evaporation ponds. Finally, we talk about landfill capping and minimizing the quantity of lead shape generated by infiltration through caps. All of those goals are still relevant. OK, so I wanted to talk about some metrics because this is where it starts to tie into what we actually measure on site. So the typical metrics that have been established and considered as reasonable best practice, I suppose, at the moment, is a freeboard, which means that's the amount of a gap between the top of your wall of your lead shape pond and the actual level of the lead shape within it. That's what freeboard is. Needs to be a minimum of half a metre wise, so you don't have waves of lead shape splashing over the walls, for example. You certainly don't want lead shape overflowing. So that's a key critical measure of success of a infrastructure component of your system, right? So we can use that as are we performing well or not as an indicator? When we look at the lead shape, the Beppham compliant landfill cells, that's the ones which are constructed in accordance with the Beppham. Typically, the guidance we're looking at is the maximum head of lead shape on the liner surface. Now, what's head? Well, that's just the amount of lead shape sitting on top of a liner. The more head you have, the more downward pressure there is on the liner and the more chance there is for seepage to occur. People talk about Darcy's Law as a way to calculate that. So that's another important metric that still has a lot of credibility. When we're talking about cells that may have been constructed prior to Beppham being in place or they're not compliant with Beppham, we talk about different controls. We talk about using groundwater levels and groundwater gradients to ensure that we don't have pollution flowing off site. What does that mean? Well, a groundwater gradient is the slope of the groundwater. So if you maintain a level of leachate in your landfill lower than the surrounding groundwater level, then the theory is that the groundwater will flow towards that lowest point and therefore back in towards the landfill. So you won't have leachate migrating off site, which is just good common sense. So that still holds in terms of leachate management or the extraction and levels in the sumps. So leachate sumps are really where you deploy your pumps to pump out leachate. The rules of those are typically set in the hydrogeological assessments that are undertaken. And the control on those levels is set by typically automating your pumps to operate at a certain level within those sumps. Those sumps are designed to remove the leachate. The leachate is coming through your drainage layer, which has that other criteria that we mentioned earlier, the leachate on the liner system of 0.3 of a metre. Now, the last one is lysimeters. So there is a criteria around making sure that the infiltration through your cap is less than that that flows out the base of your liner in the system. Right. So what does the future look like? Sorry for all this writing, I should have put a few more pictures in there. To me, it seems to be about evidence that the site facility controls have been established, implemented, controlled and maintained. So you will have a document saying how you're going to operate the site, how you're going to manage the leachate, but you need to be able to show that that's been working and is continuing to work. And that the monitoring will be against the agreed environmental performance objectives. And really the intent of that is other systems working. Right. There will be operational controls that are set to mitigate any risk of harm. And these, sorry, to an acceptable level, which under the act is so far as reasonably practicable. There will be operational reports, data reports and facility maintenance reports required to really report on that, in my opinion. We'll also have reports which are a bit more focused on continuous monitoring and I think around completeness of data. So we do some of these sorts of facility monitoring sites for heavy industry, where you're looking at a whole lot of metrics, which traditionally you would have said a more about operational metrics. And these these are very important in the context of showing that you're maintaining these systems. So there's things there like data completeness. So have you measured at the frequency you said you would? Have you validated that data that it makes sense? And then you have summary reports of excedences and summary reports of alarms, which show you've been long compliant. Right, well, that's that's the end of the slog through the legislation. I hope I've emphasised it enough that this is really about monitoring operational performance these days, a lot of it. Doesn't mean the other stuff's not there, but that's the big change. Fortunately, that's where automated monitoring can play a really important role. I just thought I'd put this slide in. This is one of our standard slides that we put in around all our monitoring systems. The world is full of sensors for measuring various things under different scenarios. You you select different types, but you know, you can have cameras to see your operations and you can have them going 24 seven. You can have tablets to input data to allow everyone on site to do manual data collection and record things. You can have continuous data to measure all sorts of data. To measure all sorts of things, using sensors and telemetry, you can still use laboratory data. Mind you, if you're measuring operations of things like pumps from that sort of thing, that becomes less relevant. You can use things like drones to look at emissions through landfill caps. And some people use satellite data to look at things like conditions of dams and that sort of thing that's not really relevant to landfills. What I'm pointing out here is there's lots of ways to measure how your operations are going. And they would seem to be practical and reasonable. So I think there's going to be an emphasis on showing that you do have a high level of oversight of the operations because it's not going to be technology that's going to limit that. You've got to get that data back. So that's where we talk about telemetry. And that's really typically using the telephone phone network or the cellular network. So that's that sort of 4G, 5G network. If it's a remote site, some of these rural landfills may not have reception, we can use satellite. And sometimes rarely, we may use a LauraWan network which might be set up as sort of part of a smart city framework. All of that data needs to go somewhere and that goes to the cloud. And then from there, that data then goes into either a HydroTera server or a client server where we use API links to move the data around to give it access to various software packages, etc. All of this is important in the context of automated monitoring of leachate systems and the monitoring of those. An important blob on this picture is the control automation. So you can these days use these monitoring networks to inform control of pumps and the like. So if you've got a sensor measuring level, it can come back via the internet and it can still be sending a command to tell a pump to turn on or off. A lot of pure rest electronic engineers don't like that. I'm trying to get engineers don't like that. I can feel yick screaming next to me. They like to have more direct control over those things using things like SCADA or even direct sort of switches but we'll talk more about that later. Remote oversight is very important. I think there's enough functionality to see how a land feels operating remotely these days with technology that may well be one way of showing that you are keeping on top of your operations. We've developed a bit of a process for documenting how to design such systems and that was set up more for in the context of Hydrotera develops a lot of sort of both long-term monitoring sites for research organizations and all sorts of things. But I think the same process is gonna apply in this instance. So just going around this schematic, you have a manual which sort of sets out the rules for how you document your system. So there'll be, it's a bit like a quality system for documenting systems. So it's got naming conventions for monitoring positions, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also got naming conventions for instrumentation and asset registers and those sorts of things. That's important because you use that to help prepare your monitoring plan and system design. A monitoring plan says we wanna measure this and we wanna measure it at this frequency. A system design says we're gonna use this particular sensor and it's gonna be integrated in this way. Also included in here is actual measurement methods which are documented and are based on strain standards, et cetera. So that's a way to get rigor around documenting your designs of these systems which can then go to the EPA for review or support another application. Once we've actually finished the design, we build it and then we refer to that as a system specification. That's your as built documentation and this tends to evolve with time because as we all know, monitoring systems and components of those systems tend to need to be fixed over time. So components change. So this is really a dynamic inventory, I feel like, of the assets on the site as well as how they're integrated. We then integrate all that into our software that we call Datastream and we have a management framework around that to ensure that the works are happening and we have a service level agreement which is specific for a site to say, we will achieve x% up time in terms of communications and oversight, et cetera. That's important because managing these networks is significant and you end up with lots and lots of sensors and even if they only fail occasionally when you've got lots and lots of sensors it's still a big job. So how do I think the world's gonna be running? Well, I think the bit that's changed. So I tried to think of how site operations might change for everyone. Really, most landfills have a site owner, most have a site operator, sometimes the owner is the operator. And then typically we've got an environmental consultant who's looking after environmental compliance. This person here is, I think, a new player in the game which is under the monitoring and control contractor. I think there's gonna be a lot more emphasis on having people around who understand instrumentation and how systems work and how to oversight them because that's where the emphasis is focused. So I've called that a monitoring and control contractor. That's the sort of work HydroTera does. I think there'll be a need for very strong collaboration between companies like ourselves with the consultants to make sure there's good alignment in the reporting mechanisms because we still have to report on environmental compliance, right? So I see that there's gonna be more work to be done and I think there'll be better environmental outcomes for that work, but I think that's the sort of blend of the teams that will emerge. Okay, so what can we measure and how will that change our lives? This is actually drawn from a report I prepared back in about 2015 where we were working on a site which had too much leachate and they were trying to work out how to manage that for the long term. The picture on the left is really a bit of a water balance based on sources of leachate. So you refer to the inputs like infiltration of leachate through the cap infiltration of through the evaporative transpiration cap in this instance and infiltration through traditional clay cap. So there was uncapped cells, there were cap cells and there were transpiration caps on that side. So a number of different ways for leachate to be generated. We then identified the storages. So how much leachate was actually on the site? Where was it? Was it in the cells? Was it in the transfer lines? Was it in the leachate bonds? We looked at various ways that leachate could be lost from that. So it could be trucked off site evaporated from leachate bonds. Could be seeping through the liner. Very hard to quantify that one. And it could be going off site to sewer. There were also other inputs. So groundwater was a big issue on this side and there was also some potential for those cells to be leaking to groundwater. The reason I put that in was really on just about every landfill site you're dealing with that sort of flow diagram. And I think a sniff of what best practice might evolve to is knowing what those quantities are at any point in time and being able to monitor them and show the regulator that you're managing that flow of leachate from start to finish. In terms of identifying hazards and that sort of thing, this table on the right was also just an extraction from that report. But it does tie in reasonably nicely with that, with the framework going forward where you've got to identify your risks, your rank for hazards. And then you look at how you're gonna monitor those hazards, how will we actually achieve these measures? So if you look at this one, there was a risk of leakage of leachate through the liner. It was a high concern and the head of leachate on the liner. I don't think we're gonna extrapolate it from the leachate levels. At the end of the day, we had to come up with a system to monitor that in real time. So that's where we set it on automated level measurement and we had two options. We had bubblers and we had pressure transducers. Now, there are other options for that, but in this particular case as part of this design process that we went through, we were asked to recommend various different devices that could be used to align with these risks and the operational hazards. Now, it's that sort of layout that I think is gonna be very important going forward to be able to show what your operational measure is against these risks and hazards to satisfy everyone that we have a means of monitoring our performance. So onto some case studies and this is where I'm gonna get Yicandom to assist me. This is a landfill that has many cells and it has a lot of groundwater sumps. So I just put this slide into sort of show you what can be achieved. So this is a snapshot out of our data stream site which just shows you get a real-time reading of the levels coming up on the screen and those levels are being read from fences where the data's been coming back via telemetry and going into the data stream site. The parameters in the table at the bottom are important to note, right? So you need to know the depth of your sump and the depths of sumps do change, believe it or not, as they fill up with stuff. So it's always good to know what the depth is. They can get clogged up. Then we need to measure our leachate level and MBTOC stands for meters below top of casing. We then need to survey the top of casing to get this against a datum which we call meters Australian height datum or meters AHD. That's very important because that's actually how the EPA want us to report on these things but it's also important because it allows you to have a relative level versus all the other bits on the site. So in the end, you end up with a bunch of metrics in meters AHD and you end up with a calculated leachate depth above liner. So there's no reason why you can't have that data coming in continuously telling you that leachate depth above your liner and there's plenty of sites where we have installed that. All right, so Yic, would you like to just talk a little bit? Here's some examples of sumps where we've set up automated monitoring of leachate sumps. Do you wanna have a little chat today, sir? Yeah. So we got a few options to monitor the leachate level on the left. So typically we use a pressure transducer or a bubbler or that is not ultrasound, it's actually a sonic sensor but we're more like with, I think the pressure transducer probably be the most common type like and the one we normally use is called like make of a PP body, like chemical resistant plastic. So just sort of different chemicals in the leachate and bubbler typically costs a bit more but they have less maintenance when they're way like because they don't have electronics in the sump. So basically we run a bubbler tube, just a tubing to the bottom of the sump and yeah, so the bubbler system will have a compressor pumping compressed air through and then once the bubbler escape from the end of the tube and we get the equilibrium pressure and that converts to the head of leachate above it and yeah, so to convert that to the level. And whereas a sonic sensor pretty much mounted on the top of the leachate sump, normally we need a sounding tube for it so that to get a better accuracy because the sonic sensors works on wave reflections and they work out the time for the wave to travel down and then it was miles back and just work out the time of traveling and so that maybe know where the leachate level is. And so yeah, so and then for the second one like there's a pump, but so normally we have pneumatic pumps in the landfill, like big landfill normally they have all these infrastructure ready they got power, they got big compressor run all these pneumatic pumps air well pumps typically. And yeah, so there's four big landfill sites and there's no problem to put on those, to install those pumps but we did encounter quite a number of small landfill operators like run by council and they don't have their closed landfill they don't have power so they can't really run a big compressor to power up the air well pump. So what we did install was a solar pumping system like we run off the power that saw the pump by solar power and yeah, so and this is working right well and you know, it's kind of a sustainable solution. I think we've got a slide showing that one. Yeah, it's the next slide. Yeah, do you want to talk to that? So yeah, so that's what we set up back in 2019 for Macedon Rangers Dry Council and it's a landfill, it's the place called land so it's actually a golf course, a mini golf course now I think like it's a closed landfill and then they got no power so and but they got an EPA notice they need to manage the landfill and there's actually all the newspaper a few years ago so so so what happens is like they actually engage us yeah to design a system. Yeah, so with solar solar panel and solar power pump and to come to actually bleach it out to a evaporation point probably 150 meter away from from the boat. So so we install a pump, install a level sensor smart sensor that that control the pump on and off based on the trigger level and then we actually monitor the leachate being pumped out from the ball using a flow meter and all this data actually being delivered to our data stream portal online so the client can always look at the leachate level and get alarms if it's out of control um and yeah so so the same cows actually has got another landfill recently and and they put on a tender I think I think we're going to get it right from from what I heard like so they're more more more projects like using using this similar technology yeah so it's called sustainable energy sustainable and reliable other signs but yeah what's the maximum fly right you get out of that I did really depends on the pump as well like so we put in a pump this this pump I think it's pumping with 30 liter per minute or so but but these these balls actually they they kind of lower you like they they did produce a lot of leachate um it's yeah it's typical like you know we talk about like one or two uh but the per minute or even less it really depends on on the location so so the new the new requirements a new standard they have actually like I got 130 kilo a month yeah so about 10 kilo a day all right next slide I hope everyone understands that one so the reason um to show this is um you cast your mind back to the previous slides we had a lot of vertical sumps but you also get inclined sumps which provides another challenge in terms of really establishing what elevation you've deployed at so you need to do a bit of geometry do that um Dom do you want to talk to this one and have a go yeah sure so I think one thing worth highlighting is the the benefit of actually having a telemetry system attached to a level monitoring setup so yes there's a few types of level sensing devices in terms of using bubbles or submersible transducers or some kind of sonic device so they all have an output that can be used to basically a logger box and if that logger box has a modem and there's decent site reception you can shoot all that data straight up to the cloud and in terms of just being able to have eyes on your site it's an incredible advantage because you can from from your office access the web and see all your level conditions straight away without having to wait for side operators to go outside um and realize equipment's not working or or there's some kind of issue sort of a long time after that actual issue in the cloud so just just being able to have the benefit of eyes on site is a real advantage of the telemetry setup not to mention the control option as well so there's there's loggers available that can have a switching output so not only can you send data up to the internet where you can access it from any way where you've got internet you can also set up levels and thresholds where you might want to switch power to a pump so if you're trying to try to maintain your lead shape or a certain level you can set a threshold value and it'll actually switch a relay to power that pump and you can also set alarms so if you have particular thresholds that you don't want to be exceeded you can set sort of staged alarms where if there is an issue and a pump stops working you know straight away if if you have lead shape coming up too high you can set up SMS or or email alarms so you're notified straight away so you can jump on an issue before why you still got time to rectify it so so there's a lot of flexibility with the telemetry systems in terms of just reading data so you can access it online but also being able to have that ability to control switching outputs for lead shape pumps and a lot of versatility with what kind of sensors can be used in terms of just really accessing the information from the lead shape level and what are we actually looking at there Don what's the device that's connected up oh so this this particular setup here is a bubbler setup so as it was saying before that the really nice aspect of a bubbler setup is you don't actually have any electronics down the bore so you just have an integrated level sensor and compressor unit all above ground all above the head works and when that compressor runs it pushes air down the tube and you get your your pressure above the end of the tube which tells you your level at the end of the tube so in this particular case there's no automatic control here we're just getting level measurements and we're just verifying that the existing pump in this sump here is actually working and if that if that level comes up too high the operator gets an email alarm and so they know to send out a maintenance crew to to have a look at what's going on with the pump before an issue arises so just a really good way to get eyes on site. I'm wanting a bit of thought on Tom we might move to this one yick this was the site that's created lots of joy for you over the years it's a lycemitter so as I mentioned earlier lycemitters are used to estimate the amount of seepage going through a cap this particular cap is at what they call a transpiration cap so that's where you're using the soil and the more importantly the vegetation that you grow on that soil as the capping mechanism the theory being that when it rains the rain gets absorbed into the soil and then it gets retained there and sucked back out by the vegetation when the vegetation is done transpiring so it's an area I've done quite a lot of work in actually and I've done sort of numerical modelling of that so you can use various models to calculate the thickness of these caps but this is a system to directly measure whether or not it is operating in accordance with all those models so do you want to talk a bit about what you learned on this one yick he's a bit nervous well basically I just provide all these instruments and I mean like I'm not doing reporting so so basically we do a monitor like surface runoff like so we got a dipping bucket the flow gauge it's actually a big big rain gauge like a big version of a rain gauge so measuring surface runoff and subsurface runoff normally that for this particular side they have a two meter that like the liner was inside two meters so and then they have declared all the water so they measure that subsurface runoff and then they also have the surface drain another flow gauge measuring the surface runoff so and then then we got two soil moisture where is that I think we got six different depth per probe and so they work out that what's the soil moisture content in the soil and then at the same time we got this where the station yeah recording all this like rain where the like wind direction wind speed what else and yeah and red soil radiation and stuff like that so yeah that was good yick so just just for the the viewers so from left to right that's a little sort of micro climate weather station on the left the second one over is what they call a tipping bucket rain gauge it just water flows down a funnel in the top and it clicks over each time and each clicks worth about what point two point two of a mill and it counts the number of clicks and it can tell you therefore rainfall and rainfall intensity the next one is where we're collecting the subsurface output so there's that white pipe that the water comes out and it drops into what's essentially at another tipping bucket rain gauge one thing to note here with this one is there's a lot of sediment that can build up in these and therefore there's a lot of maintenance that's required so a big structure like this like this lysimeter this is monitoring on steroids right it really is a big project and and lots of work as we move into this new act and and what's reasonable I think looking at other approaches for proving up transpiration caps might might be useful too like you can do a lot just with soil moisture sensors and the tipping bucket rain gauge but certainly an impressive site we'll just take along here because we've only got 10 minutes left so these ones are flow meters so on the left that's a flow meter on a stormwater so that would be for ultimately discharging off-site and don do you want to talk to the one in the middle about the stormwater pond level measurement yeah sure so so you don't always have to go like a full deluxe setup so the one in the middle here is basically like a very compact a very compact version of a level monitoring system so all we've got here is a level transducer run down the PVC pipe into the water and it just runs up to a logger box standalone on the steel post there with a sim card in it so all low power inside that box is a little internal lithium ion battery which will last about a year so the only real maintenance needed is the operator to come out and swap that battery once a year and then it'll just tick away you know largely unsupervised and send level data up to up to the cloud where you can access so there's lots of options for monitoring applications where you may want many many sensors out on site but don't necessarily want to go for the full sort of solar power battery setup which can push the the cost up quite a bit so you can have very small compact simple systems that will last a long time low maintenance so that's that's one one solution and you were pretty keen to have these ones in this yeah sure so the one on the right are quite interesting of the type of control setup you can have so in this particular case we've got two ponds so the the box on the left is inside a pumping shed which pumps lead shape up to an evaporation pond up the top so there is communication between the two logger boxes installed at each site so each site has a level sensor and so we set up the two level sensors essentially to talk to each other through the internet so one sensor down at the lower ponds will basically switch power to the pump once it reaches the pre-determined level will pump up to the top ponds but then the top pond level sensor will actually override and disable that pump at the bottom if the top level ponds capacity gets too full so that there's a lot you can do in terms of sites that are geographically sort of remote from each other like two pumping setups and still having communication of monitoring systems between them excellent excellent uh groundwater level monitoring i'm going to assume most people know that we can automatically measure groundwater level one thing to note is you can automatically contour groundwater level data using data stream software these days which is pretty cool maintenance the grim reality or it's a pretty boring slide so we can skip over it other than to say look maintenance is a reality and if you don't maintain these systems regularly in accordance with manufacturer's guidance then the quality of data and the quality of measurement drops off i feel that where the EPA is going with their regulations that they'll be expecting a high level of maintenance and a high level of quality of monitoring and servicing of equipment pumps etc more generally to achieve the outcome they want so that concludes our presentation on leachate management using technology and we have a few questions which is good keep them coming there's three questions at the moment okay there's one from mckel oi i'm sorry if i pronounced that incorrectly nillumbik has installed a telemetry system recently we have two leachate ponds therefore bottom pond where the leachate from the landfill flows the column in the bottom dam needs to be pumped to the upper evaporation pond question is the telemetry system able to set up conditions for the two ponds before the pump can be activated to prevent overflow yes so that that was one of the examples we gave earlier is that that can absolutely be done so as long as you've got good cell network on site then you can use the logger boxes that are attached to the level sensors to talk to each other to switch power to a pump and across two different sites yes good question next question i'm going to miss one question how do you provide intrinsically safe telemetry equipment on landfill site given there is no the systems are intrinsically safe solar banner intrinsically safe solar banner they probably i don't know how many times more expensive and and uh yeah so they're running on battery i yeah we don't have any intrinsically safe battery system so far i think there might be some out there on the market might be like i don't know like it's just not common yeah so typically we we don't have intrinsically safe systems the bubbler the bubbler itself doesn't have any electronics down the holes and you can run that tube quite a long way so you can achieve a safe distance away from from a sump for example so that there's some standalone units that will run intrinsically safe something got the gas claim but not not on telemetry yeah i think we might if we find anything else out about intrinsically safe telemetry we'll we'll share a response back to you um we've got mckel back again we had an overflow on our top dam recently um there was before the threshold set up properly yeah so that was before the system yeah it's kind of like when we install it like we we kind of like we notify um the consultants about like we we're going to do some monitoring make sure uh it's kind of like we we got to watch it like for a while before before you know we know it's actually working properly and there was an incident like it's actually overflowing because um the level wasn't set up quite right so we we actually fixed that level uh threshold after that so um but but that that was you know we're still called different issues okay next question from steve cody it seems quite hi steve good to hear from you it seems quite easy to establish telemetry when cell network is good do you have solutions using radio links and or hardwired connections where cellular is not so reliable of course we can use this our radio system is always there but i don't know like um the laura laura could be a solution but again laura we still like is a radio system um yeah we we've done laura for for the farm or agriculture but not not on actually on the land field so we do we do have some radio setups um but today we found there'd been a real pain so by by a long shot our experience has been we can get a cell network with a booster antenna is by far the most reliable so so yes that we have we have got radio setup but not without difficulty we did do that one in south australia where we had a direct um radio link you know the discharge the brine discharge the one yeah yeah that was all radio control wasn't for the actual pump control this is the fixing to the p o c and stuff yeah um is okay another question from michael we might bring you up michael is there a possibility to have a soft switch to turn pump to manual using soft switch via internet we'll catch up with you after this i think carl just to have a chat about that um another question is it possible to monitor the signal yes you can get you can get the 3g 4g loggers which do rfso data back through to the u platform okay all right so i think that's concluded the q and a session thank you very much for all your questions and um michael will give you a call about that soft switch option but thank you very much everyone for coming today it's been a pleasure to share some knowledge with you thanks very much