Water and Effluent Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/917412
A WaterGEMS of a master plan • When Brazilian company Prolagos decided to put its water master plan into action it turned to hydraulic modelling to find the best scenario. BRL26M (£5.2M) in energy annually and operated at a 45% water-loss rate. The sys- tem supplied 91% of the resi- dent population and needed to meet demands five times greater during tourist season, with supply sources more than 50km away. "Região dos Lagos is a trop- ical paradise without freshwa- ter resources," says Prolagos senior project manager Wagner Carvalho. "It is a huge challenge to collect water in another province, so we need to invest a lot in infrastructure. At the same time, we have high energy costs to keep the sys- tem working." In addition to the lack of resources, fluctuating demands throughout the sea- sons, and financial implica- tions of the project, Prolagos also faced integrating ONSITE HYDRAULIC MODELLING The existing water distribution network in the Região dos Lagos region operated at a 45% water-loss rate enormous amounts of data from different systems, devices, sensors, and instru- ments within the water net- work. In order to be more effi- cient and to provide a decision support tool for the different what-if scenarios, the project team needed to utilise an inter-operable platform to manage the multitude of docu- ment formats and the huge vol- ume of data. P rolagos, a subsidiary of Aegea Group, is responsi- ble for providing water and sewerage services to five municipalities in Região dos Lagos, Rio de Janeiro. Prolagos manages a total water network encompassing 2,000km of dis- tribution pipelines and accom- modates for variable seasonal fluctuations ranging from 400,000 to almost two million inhabitants at the peak of the tourist season. The region also lacks fresh water resources as all the sur- rounding lakes contain hyper- saline water, which is unfit for human consumption. Water is distributed from a spring 70km away, and four pump stations were required to provide water to the inhabitants, but the cur- rent system had not been per- forming optimally. Prolagos undertook a major program, called the Water Master Plan 2041, to expand the water supply system with short-term and long-term goals for a more sustainable future. To implement this project, Pro- lagos used Bentley's WaterGEMS to create, com- pare, and optioneer more than 50 hydraulic modelling scenar- ios, reduce energy consump- tion and non-revenue water, calibrate the network model, and enable collaborative deci- sion-making for the new water distribution system. Tourist season The existing water distribution network in the Região dos Lagos region consumed 10 WET NEWS JANUARY 2018 Using WaterGEMS, Prolagos implemented a systematic approach to combining asset, customer, and operational information from various sources in the water network into a collaborative, calibrated hydraulic modelling environ- ment. To make coordinated decisions about the designs for the supply and distribution system, the Prolagos team relied on WaterGEMS to create Simulating new intake scenarios in WaterGEMS helped determine how to reduce high-pressure loss, and automate terrain extraction