viii UK Focus - Water / Wastewater
Instrumentation, Data & Information – An End to End Process
The wastewater industry is under increasing pressure to deliver the services that it needs to its customers. Escalating pressures, such as those of increasing population numbers, as well as climate change, the Carbon Reduction Commitment, the Water Framework Directive, and the drive to increase business effi ciency of in order to keep customer’s bills at an affordable level have resulted in the need to deliver better effl uent from treatment works.
The water industry has a large number of challenges to face, and delivering effi ciency in the way it operates is going to require more instrumentation employed in the correct way.
AMP 6 is set to become the asset management period of effi ciency, with many Water & Sewerage Companies (WASC’s) expected to do more for less. The challenge for the water industry will be to answer the question of “How to deliver an increased level of service for a lesser operating cost.” Looking at the trends of the industry it is quite clear how some water companies intend to deliver this service to their customers.
Thames Water have quite clearly shown that they are a forward thinking company within this fi eld, taking on IBM as a strategic partner due to its experience in big data, the installation of smart potable water networks and meters, investment in advanced process control systems at some of their major works, and more recently the announcement of the use of real time asset monitoring with Accenture.
Thames are not the only WASC to do this, as both Southern Water and Northumbrian Water have also invested in APC; most water companies are seen to be interested in the possibilities and potentials surrounding the use of Smart Wastewater Networks. Only Southern Water was brave enough to go public and announce it formally in their business plan.
However, underpinning all of these initiatives is the need for data and information, and for these things to be gathered the industry has to get serious about the instrumentation that it has in both the networks and treatment works that serve its customers.
The State of Play in Instrumentation
The number of instruments and sensors that are available to WASC’s at the current time is probably at the greatest level it has ever been. The industry has technologies solely to measure the fl ow that is passing through the wastewater system which encompass level (ultrasonic & radar), radar velocity, time of fl ight, electromagnetism, area velocity, laser, and more recently microwave in various different forms. The choice is quite literally staggering and the various research departments of the supplying companies have worked hard to deliver this wide choice.
However, if you walk onto the vast majority of wastewater treatment works in the UK you will see very little instrumentation. All sites above 50m3
/day are required, as per the Environmental
Oliver Grievson BSc(Hons) MSc FIEnvSc MCIWEM CEnvCSci C.WEM Group Manager – Water Industry Process Automation & Control Tel: 07930-546-027
Web:
www.wipac.org.uk Email:
olivergrievson@hotmail.com IET March / April 2014
www.envirotech-online.com
Permit, to monitor fl ow, and on the smaller works there may be a rotation sensor on a biological fi lter; in an activated sludge plant a dissolved oxygen probe may be present, but overall the level of instrumentation is relatively low.
On the larger works the situation is slightly different, as more enlightened companies have turned their treatment works into pseudo production factories capable of producing energy and biosolids, with one recovering phosphorus as a resource, and yet others providing fi nal effl uent to customers for water reuse.
The question is, though, where should the industry go?
Just a another choice of meters including fl ow, level & dissolved oxygen (left to right)
Where should the Industry go?
In the UK the industry has developed a different operational model in the 25 years since privatisation, and gone is the era when each treatment works would have a dedicated operator, or indeed when there was an operator to look after just a handful of treatment works. We are currently in a time when where an operator goes is governed by SAP and Click, and this has brought effi ciencies in the way that treatment works are operated.
This particular fl ow meter a 900mm electromagnetic fl ow meter - one of the standard choices in the Water Industry
However, what is missing is the instrumentation in the fi eld that gives the operator the data to make an informed decision andto enable them to actually operate a treatment works rather than simply clean it and measure manually how the works are performing. Despite this, a guesstimate of how much data is produced by the water industry daily would not be far off if a fi gure of around 300 million actual data points per day was stated.
Other choices include ultrasonic fl ow meters, Time of Flight Flow meters, Insertion Flow Meters & non contact fl ow velocity meters (last two pictured)
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
