Utility Week

31 ISSUE 01 OCT/2018 Yorkshire Water cuts development costs e water company's use of VR has paid dividends A virtual reality system implemented by Yorkshire Water in collaboration with the University of Sheffield has resulted in £180,000 of direct cost savings and better-quality designs. e university's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) developed the custom VR software, experienced via HTC Vive headsets, to enable engineers at the water company to prototype new equipment and test plans for treatment works in immersive 3D. "Traditionally when we design a new asset we asked a manufacturer to build a prototype, which can cost anywhere between £50,000 and £100,000," says Steve Wright, standard product and solutions manager at Yorkshire Water. " e creation of 'digital twins' of proposed products in VR is comparatively cheaper and enables us to interrogate designs more closely." Rigorously testing in a virtual environment helps the company improve construction accuracy and underpins a drive to manufacture more equipment off site. At a macro level, the team created detailed VR models of Irton water treatment works in Scarborough, which is undergoing a £17.5 million upgrade, and Knostrop waste water treatment works in Leeds, based on 3D models supplied by the main contractors. e system enables engineers to visualise different design options and detect clashes, while facility operators and maintenance engineers can check access requirements and the orientation and height of valves or other equipment. "It's all very well using 2D design drawings, but when you are stood virtually in a space you can actually check the physical dimensions. e HTC Vive is set to the specific users' height and your arms are visible in 3D in front of you; you are essentially present in the space," says Wright. " e beauty of VR is almost anyone can interact with an environment, you don't have to be a technical person, which takes collaboration to a whole new level – people from across the entire company can get involved." AMRC was established to bridge the gap between advanced manufacturing technologies and end users in business. Its industrial clients include giants such as Boeing, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and Airbus. A professional designer and a gamer were assigned to the project, whom Yorkshire Water challenged to develop the system to enable multiple users to collaborate and communicate inside the same VR model. "We just completed a demo with two people inside a model who were able to see each other, as 3D avatars, and talk to each other, which we understand is a first for the construction and water sectors," says Wright. e culmination of the project will be the launch of a VR suite with dedicated computers and a high-definition screen, where engineers will import Inventor, Revit and Navisworks models into VR and explore and interrogate them on a daily basis. recruit and maintain young talent. HoloLens is really a great use of both a way to do knowledge transfer, but also to give modern tools for a modern workforce," says Martine. Metawater, a leading Japanese provider of repair and maintenance services for water and sewage infrastructure, has seen the benefits of using augmented reality technology to help transfer the skills of ageing employees to new recruits (see box). at said, VR and AR systems are still nascent and may not be suitable for every situation or application. VR headsets tend to be quite large and need to be tethered to a powerful PC and the ability to collaborate with colleagues in virtual environments is unproven. AR is at present unable to map and tag all the complexity associated with legacy electricity grids, gas or water networks, which comprise multiple 'sedimentary' layers of assets built up over decades. "A transformer on a pole at one intersection may be totally different from one a block away. Multiply that by thousands of miles of circuits in any given territory and the number of contextual permutations is huge," says Glickman. "We are still in the early stages of assembling the right datasets and algorithms to be able to interpret the context and provide the right cues for AR. Machine learning may be able to resolve this in future." Smart Helmets worn by engineers at Baker Hughes make maintenance more efficient

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