Key points
Most people do not think about “the water” in their daily lives. Of course, they know they need water for survival, but they probably do not think about where their water comes from or about the processes it must go through to become useable and clean drinking water. That crucial responsibility goes to the Water & Wastewater industry.
The industry is facing increasingly pressing challenges to provide water to the global populace. Challenges such as phenomenal population growth, population migration from rural to urban areas, ever more stringent environmental regulations, and aging and inadequate water infrastructure and more.
The rise of digital technologies, however, is providing new ways for organisations in the Water and Wastewater sector to face these challenges head-on, simply by using something they already own: their captured sensor data.
This data can include everything from information regarding water quality to temperature changes, but only by fully leveraging the data does it become truly useful. Luckily, today there are advanced analytics solutions that provide an economical, efficient way this can be easily accomplished.
Process Experts Can Do the Analytics Themselves
While there are many treatment plants not yet using data analytics to solve complex process issues, there are many that are. Some of those, however, often use their own data scientists, and others use external consultancies.
The downside to this approach is that it is time-consuming and costly for these third parties to do extensive data modeling and statistics, and more importantly, there just aren’t enough data scientists for all the work.
A more viable and practical solution would be to let the process experts do the analytics themselves. These tools allow the process experts to monitor, analyse, and predict treatment processes giving them a holistic overview of what is going on in the plant.
Advanced analytics uses pattern recognition and machine learning to fully leverage process data. With its capabilities, process experts have “eyes into the processes” and can get data-driven insights. This means they will be able to use to data to solve operational issues and not have to rely only on their experience or instinct to tweak operations to solve problems.
Process experts will be able to analyse the data to monitor processes, so they will know exactly what the problem is, and quickly work to solve it. To gain a better understanding of the value of advanced analytics in the Water & Wastewater industry, two use cases will be discussed.
Use Case: Monitoring Pump Operation States
Pumps are, without a doubt, critical assets for the Water & Wastewater industry. Keeping them in operation is necessary to keeping processes running. A breakdown of an important pump can lead to serious problems, so in order to avoid an unplanned shutdown, process experts must regularly maintain them. However, not all breakdowns can be avoided since the operation state of a pump is not closely monitored. Process and asset experts often do not have the required tooling or the time to follow-up on every important asset within their responsibilities. An answer to this common operational issue would be to have access to an easy, reproducible, and reliable approach to monitor the operation state of important assets.
Time series data, which can include information related to pressure difference, vibration, flow rates and shock pulse measurements (SPM) and which are all available for historical analysis, can be used for monitoring purposes.
In a recent use case, advanced analytics was used to create an indicator to trigger a monitor. The pressure difference is a good indicator of the pump operation state and therefore can be used as the basis for further analysis and monitoring. In this case, since the pressure difference had a lot of noise (yellow trend in the figure below), process experts used an aggregation to smooth out the trend visualised in a new tag (red trend following the yellow pressure difference Figure 1).
The other red tag displays the flow rate, which is roughly constant during operation. The pressure difference rises throughout its lifecycle until the next maintenance cycle, which can be visually seen as the sudden drops in the flow rates and pressure differences. By knowing this behavior, it is very simple to create a monitor using advanced analytics to inform the process and/or asset experts in time of the pump status.
Advanced analytics offers easy and fast access to process data, which can be manipulated to create a clear indicator of the pump operation status. The created monitor will enable the process and asset experts to schedule maintenance at the appropriate time before pump failure or before a major process issue occurs. As a result, shutdowns and the over-maintenance of the pumps can be avoided, resulting in an overall operation that is more cost efficient.
Use Case: Water Network Anomalies
Referring again to Figure 1 in the first use case, it is noticeable that the flow rate was quite constant in that process. This is not always the case, of course, and makes the analysis of the overall operation state more complex. This next use case brings this complexity to the table.
A water network is a large-scale facility which can cover extensive cities. Detecting and reacting to changes within this network can greatly improve the overall operational excellence. However, to check if there can be improvements, anomalies in the pipe characteristics of a water network must be detected.
A good and relevant relationship within a piping network is the behaviour between hydraulic head (pressure built up by liquid) and the flow rate within it. Since only separate pressure measurements were available in this case, the pressure difference had to be calculated using a formula.
This created a new calculated tag which was available for all users for later use. Since data was historically available, it could be brought into a relationship with the corresponding flow rate in the same section of the piping network. The plot below shows the relationship between the flow rate (X-axis) and pressure (Y-axis).
From the two identified operating zones (Figure 2), the engineers could see that before and after some construction works, the friction in a pressure pipe was significantly lower for the same flow rate. Based on this insight, an operation fingerprint of the normal operation region was defined and used to set a monitor to notify personnel of any changes in the overall behavior (Figure 3). This monitor would not only detect such special cases as increased friction but also detect other changes like clogging or significant leakages.
In addition to this specific use case, many benefits were also realised using advanced analytics such as:
- Prevention of major leaks, sinkholes, and clogging.
- Easier and more efficient process monitoring to indicate potential system problems.
- Significantly improved changes to the network’s overall behavior.
Ultimately, the process experts had a deeper understanding of the water network which helped them address similar future cases.
Concluding Thoughts
The Water & Wastewater industry understands the challenges it faces, and it can address these head on by adopting and using advanced analytics. The process data is there; it only has to be fully leveraged to help experts more effectively and efficiently run their plants and monitor their processes. Operational action will thus be taken through optimal data-driven insights, not just through the instinct and experience of the process experts.
