Process Monitoring and Energy Management

Process Monitoring in the water sector

Quote from customer, For the previous 18 months, Meniscus MCE has been used to identify potential energy savings opportunities on our operational sites. The total number for opportunities identified during this period is 37. The energy savings opportunities range from identifying blocked pumps to identifying potential optimisation of aeration equipment. The energy savings identified range from 1,000 kWh p.a. to 300,000 kWh pa

Overview of the Process Monitoring application

To use existing SCADA/telemetry operational data, as well as sub-metered and site-based energy data, to deliver a process energy management application for over 10,000 pumps, drives and blowers. Provides energy and process benchmarks to identify energy inefficiencies and to calculate the energy costs of operating each process and sub process.

This case study summarises the Process Monitoring application built for a Water Company to optimise and improve the energy and chemical performance of their water and wastewater treatment plant. Data is uploaded to the application on a daily basis aind includes 15 minute telemetry data from over 10,000 pumps, drives, process based flows and related data. It also loads AMR electricity use data from some 1,400 water and wastewater treatment sites.

Meniscus have been instrumental in developing the underlying hierarchy for the system, updating the system with new assets/telemetry tags and changing the taxonomy of the data to match the overall Asset database used by the company.

The Process Monitoring application imports approximately 500,000 raw data points per day calculates some 200,000 calculated points at different periodicities (15 minute, 30 minute, daily etc).

This application is built using the Meniscus Calculation Engine (MCE).

Details of how the Process Monitoring application is built

15-minute data is collected in the corporate telemetry system from some 10,000+ pumps, drives, blowers etc., as well as process specific information on flows, tank levels, dissolved oxygen and much more is pushed into the Meniscus platform at the beginning of each day.

The Analytics Platform processes this raw data into the pump and drive estimated kWh figures and then aggregates this data into sub-processes (a group of pumps for example) and then into processes (Return Activated Sludge pumping for example). At each level of aggregation, Targets are applied to the calculated data, based on historic analysis and regression techniques, as well as High and Low expected values (these values are calculated values that can be based on flows etc).

The Actual and Target values from each sub-process and process are then aggregated to a total site value and compared against the accurately measured fiscal metered electricity readings available for the overall Site.

Exceptions are generated where Actual values exceed the individual drive, sub process or process based High and Low-level values to deliver pro-active alerts that energy use for an individual, or group of pumps is higher than expected.

All the exceptions and management information is calculated within approximately 1 ½ hours of the initial raw data being fed into the system.

Benefits of using the Meniscus Calculation Engine
  • Delivers cleansed, granular, process based energy and chemical benchmarks and metrics that are used by the whole organisation via a series of management reports and dashboards.
  • Enables the integration of energy and chemical performance metrics with other corporate datasets via the corporate dashboard system, Qlikview.
  • Provides a tool to enable the Energy Team to rapidly create bespoke dashboards using widget graphs to easily communicate specific energy and chemical metrics for individual projects.
  • Is a flexible system that lets users create their own calculations and metrics
  • Saves process engineers considerable time by automating the calculation of chemical consumption values and delivering this data on a daily basis in time to quickly take remedial action if dosing rates exceed requirements.

MCE provides the Energy Team with the flexibility to create their own Process Monitoring system and directly control the calculations and information that is calculated to ensure that the data collected matches the physical infrastructure on site.

Using MCE’s widget based graphs makes it possible to share this information readily with operators on sites and lets the Energy team set up their own simple web-enabled dashboards simply and quickly.