Just a few metres from KELLER Pressure's headquarters, the Winterthur Innovation Lab opened at Grüze station in May 2024. The visitor centre serves as a meeting place for discussions about urban development, climate change and urban densification. The principle of the sponge city can also be experienced here: a rain measurement station with sensors from KELLER Pressure continuously measures and documents precipitation.

Sponge city briefly explained

The aim of the sponge city concept is to absorb rainwater locally and store it temporarily instead of discharging it directly. Soil and vegetation act like a sponge – they store water and later release it again through evaporation. Models are natural ecosystems with unsealed surfaces that can absorb significantly more water than paved urban areas. Rain measuring points such as those in the innovation lab provide important data for evaluating the effectiveness of such concepts in the long term.

KELLER Pressure sensors in use

In the innovation laboratory, the level of a column filled with rainwater (1) is precisely recorded using the 36XW level probe (2). In addition to the water level, the probe also measures the water temperature. The recorded data is transferred to the cloud via ARC1 (3) and visualised live on screens. The ARC1 also measures the air pressure and the ambient temperature in direct sunlight. This allows the influence of direct sunlight on the plants to be recorded.

The data recorded by the level probe and the remote transmission unit are visualised on a screen in the innovation laboratory.

The current live data of the «Sponge City» (German: Schwammstadt) project can be called up in the PressureSuite Cloud using the demo login.

To the login: www.pressuresuite.com

Would you like to find out more about the innovation lab and the sensors we use? Drop by or find out more here.