Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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In the know Digging deeper: smart water 28 | JUNE 2016 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Metering is the most established element of smart programmes. We are working, for instance, with Cisco to develop a smart meter programme for smart city deployment. Education and communication are a vital part of any smart meter programme. You have to put information right in the palm of the customer's hand - with an app or a Nest-type device - in order for it to have a real impact on demand, or change customer habits. A component of many smart metering programmes is predictive tools to help determine the life expectancy of meters through condition deterioration modelling. To help provide a new level of actionable data we have incorporated a geospatial view of individual meters and their status across a utility's entire network. This allows a meter's • ow, age and degradation to be investigated. Water companies are not a homogenous group, and di erent companies are - nding di erent ways to use smart meters. We have worked with one utility that is using analytics to forecast its overall pumping needs for set time periods, then determine how much pumping can be done at night when energy is cheaper. Among the early adopters of smart technology in our client base was a utility which chose to use smart analytics to monitor a micro- ltration system. They wanted analytics to examine the system, determine its cleaning regime, understand how dirty the system was before and a€ er cleaning, and determine how e ective the cleaning was. At wastewater treatment works (WwTW) smart analytics are being used to better determine energy usage. One client's system looks at each asset – each blower, pump and motor, everything using power – to build a map pinpointing exactly where energy is being consumed. Currently the water company knows the WwTW's overall energy usage, but cannot see into a speci- c system. Smart analytics allow them to compare how much energy it takes to treat a litre of wastewater during speci- c hours of the day, versus speci- c hours at night. Combined heat and power (CHP) systems, an increasingly common feature of WwTWs, are another area in which smart technology can o er signi- cant bene- ts. Pattern recognition models can detect maintenance and performance issues in their nascent stages. The same tools can then prioritise the issues by calculating their impacts. Descriptive and predictive calculations can be used to help improve energy production and reliability. Predictive calculations can also be used to anticipate future performance, reliability, and fuel usage relative to budgets for performance contracts. As commercial concerns become increasingly important to water companies the ability to help balance energy consumption and production with real-time energy market prices - where multiple energy sources are available – will become increasingly attractive. All of these features can be bundled- up in a single smart monitoring and analytics package. Although these examples show the water industry is alive to the concept of smart technology, smart water programmes have the potential to enhance many more aspects of water utility activities. More technologies and sensors are going to be focused on asset condition. Pipes will be smarter, so we can tell how they are ageing. The health of a pipe, as demonstrated by degradation in terms of its useful life, will be evident, so we will know exactly which pipes need replacing. Edge computing will allow us to assemble real-time water quality information. Currently, water is sampled and sent o -site for testing. The resulting lag in receiving test results means that, if there was a problem, the water which was tested could already be in supply. By adopting smart monitoring and analytics, utilities will not necessarily need to take water samples o -site for testing. This development could contribute to more direct potable water reuse, a scenario being tested in a project by the WaterReuse Research Foundation, using Asset 360. It is vital to make all stakeholders con- dent that reused water is safe. The challenges to greater reuse are partly public perception, and partly the veri- cation that the reuse treatment technology is performing as intended. As reuse grows in importance this is one area in which smart technology's role is likely to increase. This GIS-based smartmeter app allows the utility to visualise what is happening in the network More technologies and sensors are going to be focused on asset condition