WET News

18 WET NEWS JULY 2018 | wwtonline.co.uk communication of data and to make these decisions". Although CENTAUR does use the mobile phone network to connect to the hub to view the performance of the system through an online dashboard, the system would continue to operate if the GSM connection failed. "The communication and control element is completely autonomous," he says. The AI has been designed to react to events as they happen rather than attempting to antici- pate likely scenarios. "We're not predicting any- thing," he says. "We're not using big datasets for how the system has performed previously and behaved for different precipita- tion events. We're not using that approach at all. "As the network changes – if you add more paved areas, for example, or you've changed the hydraulic interaction within the network – the system will adapt because it's only looking at how the system is performing at that time. It's got a lot of headroom and will continue to adapt just because of the very nature of how it operates." Two deployments are under- way in Portugal and France. The first began in September in Coimbra, the former capital of Portugal, where it has been serving to protect a UNESCO The EMS team with their Most Innovative New Technology of the Year award for CENTAUR World Heritage site. "The target – the area we're trying to protect – is a square in the centre of Coimbra which has a church where the first two kings of Portugal are buried," Dr Williams adds. "The sewer stor- age is approximately a kilo- metre-and-a-half upstream. What we're doing is using the headroom that's available there to manage the flood risk." CENTAUR has controlled flows flawlessly for over 60 storms to date and reduced lev- els at the target site by around 30 per cent. For areas such as Coimbra in which there is a spe- cific area to be protected, there is the potential to add multiple gates in suitable areas of the network to create a cumulative effect. Dr Williams also says CEN- TAUR should be used in con- junction with other flood mitiga- tion measures, such as sustainable drainage systems, to maximise benefits. "If we can stop getting the water into the network in the first place, that's ideal," he says. "Once it's in the network, it's about managing it in a much smarter way. It's not meant to be used in isolation, it's meant to complementary. "If you had to build inline storage, for example, maybe you'd need half the size of the storage tank that you'd INSIGHT CSOS AND DRAINAGE originally intended because you can complement it with SuDS and CENTAUR." With the three-year Horizon 2020 project concluding in Sep- tember, EMS is now taking the product to market. Dr Williams says there has been interest from countries including Mex- ico, China, Chile, Australia and Canada, while sewerage under- takers in the US have been par- ticularly keen due to the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency's demands on cutting spills from combined sewer overflows. "For large storm events, you are limited as to what you can do about it, but a lot of CSOs spill on relatively small storm events," he says. "If you can keep the flow in the network as much as possible, obviously you're having a direct impact on mitigating pollution." Dr Williams also said they are at an advanced stage in negotiations with a number of the UK water companies – little surprise given that the Water Industry Awards judges said CENTAUR is "just the sort of thing that the water industry needs to be using if it wants to improve performance in AMP7". "It was absolutely great to win the award," he says. "The competition was really tough – we were up against global water utilities. The fact it's been recog- nised is really fantastic." NEED TO KNOW • CENTAUR requires little or no planning permission and can be installed and commissioned in as little as one day • The system is modular and extensible, with several CENTAUR installations able to form an intelligent wastewater network • The system is self-managing, although its operation can be monitored via the internet TECHKNOW • Transducers are placed inside the sewer network to monitor water levels • Modules are lamppost-mounted or in-manhole and are powered by solar or batteries with a five-year life • An online dashboard is used to monitor and communicate with the central control hub and provides a system reconfiguration facility to allow for finetuning of the Fuzzy Logic algorithm • The gate is installed within a manhole chamber and requires regular mains power from a nearby kiosk THE VERDICT "We're trying to go from a reactive state to proactive management of the network – that thinking's always been there but it's an incremental step. To get to where we are with CENTAUR now has taken 16 experts and €3.5 million." Dr Kieran Williams, EMS "If we can stop getting the excess water into the network in the first place, that's ideal. Once it's in the network, it's about managing it in a much smarter way."

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