Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/1016624
www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | SEPTEMBER 2018 | 21 Water 4.0 and the wastewater cycle To make a success of Water 4.0, the industry needs to work from the bottom up, installing the right monitoring equipment to capture the data required to make the right decisions OLIVER GRIEVSON DIRECTOR SENSORS FOR WATER INTEREST GROUP (SWIG) The Knowledge T he water industry is in a phase where it wants to get smarter. There have been recent steps towards a "digital water industry" being driven by political will. How- ever, the concept of the smart water industry - or Water 4.0 - has to be driven from the bot- tom. The right infrastructure and the right sensors need to be in place so that the right data is being collected to drive informed decision making. The recent Sensors for Wa- ter Interest Group workshop, hosted by ABB, discussed where we are as to the state of wastewater monitoring and how this can be used to drive the industry to something ap- proaching Water 4.0. Firstly, monitoring needs must be identified to help the industry deliver a holistic approach to its wastewater op- erations. From the customer's home to the treatment works, there are existing monitoring solutions that can be used. The journey of water and its points of entry into the col- lection network are largely un- monitored at present, but one of the fundamental challenges is to attempt to measure what passes through our collection networks each and every day. Apart from customers, one of the almost unmonitorable in- puts is from rainfall. Technol- ogy is certainly moving on in this area though, with rainfall radars, advanced rain sta- tions and advanced analytics platforms able to measure the type of precipitation. Add in artificial intelligence and ma- chine learning and there is the ability to measure the impact on the sewer environment and adapt network operations to suit. Once water is in the sewers it has two routes: the first through the gravity system (which most people think of when they think of sewers), and the second through the pumped wastewater network. Monitoring of the gravity sys- tem has been virtually impos- sible in the past, but through work led by the University of Sheffield we are seeing devel- opments in this area. Work on free surface dynamics, acous- tic holography and microwave sensing show the potential for measuring free-surface