Monitoring and Improving Performance in the Water Industry

Monitoring processes and interpreting the data can easily become an overwhelming task. This can be especially true in the Water Industry where there are many factors to consider across a large number of physically separate sites. Meniscus has considerable expertise in this area and some examples where we are currently helping companies include:

• Process Benchmarking on 45 Waste Water Treatment plant. Evaluating energy use at a Process level and then comparing the performance of each process against other similar processes on other sites.
• Monitoring the Energy use per Ml of water pumped for 50 boreholes. Calculations undertaken every 30 minutes to help understand pump efficiency of different pumping regimes.
• Using CUSUM analysis to identify potential ragging, blockages and similar operational issue at 35 pumping stations.
• Benchmarking the sludge thickening performance of a number of centrifuge and belt thickener systems
• Monitoring the detailed operational cost performance at a number of sludge dryers.

A brief case study.

Objective

A major UK Water Company came to Meniscus to try to make sense of the performance data from their major wastewater treatment sites. The two objectives were to identify opportunities to reduce energy, chemical and sludge costs and to make the process performance information easily accessible to various levels of staff in an understandable format.

Taking Measurements

The process plants already had standard instrumentation fitted to measure the various consumption rates. These instruments were mostly locally read meters (power meters, hours run meters, etc) together with some meters connected to the central telemetry system monitoring data in real time (flow, dissolved oxygen, tank levels, etc.). Using the powerful meter handling facilities in IPMS we were able to feed the existing measurements into the software which translated the raw data into real consumption figures. This meant there was no need to add extra instrumentation to the wastewater plants.

The data gathering was simple to implement with the raw data being collected by the plant operators and fed into the IPMS software via handheld consoles, directly onto the web site, via spreadsheets or even by simply faxing reading forms through to Meniscus.

Implementation

We developed a process model for the wastewater plant by breaking it down into a number of process units. For each unit we set up regular monthly monitoring of hours run data and using the existing meter readings were able to calculate energy use and cost.

Each wastewater plant was modeled within the software to produce individual performance and cost figures. We then set up a Process Benchmarking system across the collection of sites to compare and contrast the information for similar process units.

This information allowed us to establish performance targets for each of the processes at each site. Settings exception trigger levels to 15% above the target energy or chemical usage costs now provides operators, supervisors, etc. instant notification of potential problems within their site.

Outcome

By analysing and comparing the data from a wide range of sites the Water Company was able to identify the best operating parameters and therefore savings of over £80,000 per year.

Real time information about the actual performance and costs of each site is now available 24 hours a day to a wide range of staff. Each level of staff have their own customised reports to allow them to look at the processed data in the way that best suits their needs. By removing the complexity of the monitoring task further opportunities can now be identified and all members of the operational team can share ideas and comments on the plant operation.