Waste Water Condition Monitoring, Energy Efficiency & Predictive Maintenance

Wastewater Facility solution: reduce energy usage, improve maintenance + save money.

The problem

Wastewater facilities use huge amounts of energy and are full of assets that are difficult, disruptive and hazardous to access and maintain. Pump downtime can cause significant disruption, production loss, and may even cause damage to the pump and other equipment – shortening lifespans and increasing maintenance costs.

Our customer approached us to see if we could design a Wastewater Facility IoT solution that enabled them to reduce energy consumption and that would allow them to implement intelligent maintenance schedules to improve the uptime of their assets.

Wastewater Facility solution: implement real-time asset monitoring, improve energy efficiency + predict maintenance needs.

The solution

Wastewater pumps must be protected from downtime and faults in order to keep up with the need to move waste water around facilities without interruption. Water pump failures are a significant issue and disruptive to both customers and water companies, so being able to not just monitor them to identify problems quickly, but predicting failures before they occur is hugely desirable.

We designed and implemented a Wastewater Facility solution, built on our world-leading integrated data, AI + IoT platform, that enabled our client to collect real-time data from the water pumps’ PLCs, weather reports and from 4G energy meters, before combining data sets to identify new performance metrics, maintenance insights and improve fault detection, creating an extremely flexible solution.

Defining what data to collect is critical
In order to create the Wastewater Facility solution, we started by identifying the data needed to deliver on the customer’s goals. In this solution, this included:

Energy consumption
Water pump status
Current and predicted temperature and moist
Oil level
Energy consumption
Energy pricing
Water flow rate.

Initial goals of the Wastewater Facility solution
The first goal of the Wastewater Facility solution was to focus on connecting the waste water pumps, PLCs and external weather service to the solution in order to collect data in a consistent and reliable manner, ensuring its data quality and integrity. To achieve this, we provided the following features:

Monitoring of critical operational data received from the equipment via a web-based system
Device management
Creating business logic for the application to meet the business objectives
Providing alarm and alert notifications via email or SMS messages
Collection of historical data to enable energy consumption forecasting and fault detection
Multiple dashboards to provide the right users with the right insights
Testing of the application, making sure all of the above goals are met, based on the below solution architecture:

Before go-live, we tested four critical aspects of the Wastewater Facility solution:

Security
Our integrated data, AI + IoT platform is built with security as a top priority.

Rayven’s proprietary security architecture ensures data is secure at all points of the environment. The Wastewater Facility solution includes data encryption in transit and is encrypted from device to cloud (device-dependent). Devices are authenticated using device keys (device-dependent) and 256-bit SSL encryption is used between end-user devices (PCs, tablets, mobile phones) and the cloud, which protects confidentiality, integrity and availability of data in transit from device to cloud.

Connectivity
Once securely connected, PLC’s were connected via a Modbus connection to the 4G energy meter, which acts also as a gateway, and temperature sensors and moisture sensors were set up. The combination of a secure and encrypted transmission path, together with a dedicated and direct connection to the 4G gateway, meant a fast and secure connection could be established without needing to involve their IT team.

Data Integrity
Once all the sensors were connected to the gateway and transferring data to the platform, it was critical for us to test that the raw data on the machines and sensors matched the data in the dashboards, meaning that the connection (and the sensors) was operating effectively. In addition, it was critical to build-in capability to back-fill data in sequence in the event that communication ever goes down, so that there would never be gaps in data flows to the Wastewater Facility IoT solution.

Industrial Data Science
The objective of the exploratory data analysis was to identify trends in the data, which included:

Energy usage patterns compared with water flow data
Pumping vs. water flow pressure
Pump energy efficiency
Anomaly detection
Water pump maintenance and failure alerts.

What’s next?

We are continuing to gather additional data and growing the data sets so that we can improve the Wastewater Facility solution's energy forecasting, fault detection and predictive maintenance capabilities.

The data sources used to deliver the Wastewater Facility solution.

New and existing data was used to create the custom applications and business insights that come from the Wastewater Facility solution:

The data sources used to deliver the Waste Water Condition Monitoring, Energy Efficiency & Predictive Maintenance AI + IoT solution.

Energy meters

Water flow meters

Water pumps' PLCs

Vibration sensors

Production schedule

Human-entered data

Key features of our Wastewater Facility solution.

All of these features were customised to fit the customers specific business objectives.

Predictive maintenance

Identify when filter pressures are rising, when system checks fail, or when motors are starting to misbehave and take proactive action.

Energy monitoring

Continuous monitoring of energy consumption, including power factor, current, voltage, and frequency

Alarms & alerts

Receive immediate SMS and email alerts for energy alarms, PAC warnings and alarms, or when any metric crosses your preset thresholds.

Complete history

Even if a device can’t connect due to network issues, you can rely on the automated back-fill to retrieve device history and fill the gaps in the historical data set.

Issue management

Ensure that there is a process in place to have the right people respond based on agreed protocols.

Automated reporting

Create custom reporting dashboards and schedule them to be sent at any periodic time schedule to any specific user or user group.

Our Wastewater Facility solution delivers real business outcomes.

Lower cost of maintenance

With centralised, continuous real-time monitoring, you can avoid the need to visit sites and monitor critical performance metrics remotely. This enables you to proactively maintain your PACs.

Less downtime

Real-time monitoring allows you to identify failing equipment, proactively repair and maintain it, thereby improving uptime and customer service.

Reduced energy bill

Compare PAC performance across a site or across an entire fleet of assets to learn what makes some units more efficient than others and make better purchasing decisions.

Better resource utilisation

Send crews to the right place with the right spares, only when they are needed. This improves maintenance efficiency, speed’s fixes and reduces cost of maintenance.

Better predictability

Being able to better predict your overall performance, means you can manage your business with more confidence. Reducing the unpredictability factor that is always weighing down, allows you to make better decisions with less risk.

Increased margins

The combination of increased production, reduced waste and energy consumption, as well as lower cost of maintenance together contribute to your bottom line.