Following the success of our recent club projects we are bringing water companies together to explore the challenges of pressure management and control in clean water networks. Over the next 6 months we will be defining and launching our new club project ‘Dynamo’.
The Dynamo club project will look to emulate our hugely successful Paradigm club project by bringing industry experts together to share their experience and knowledge in the area of pressure analysis, management and control. Over the next three years we will be drawing on the industry’s combined experience to develop training materials, new processes, and create new ways of analysing data in the form of a Dynamo application for front end users.
Interested in hearing more? Contact our team to book a place on our scoping workshop on the 23rd October. Attendance is free with no obligation to take part in the club project.
There are a lot of stakeholders influencing the pressure management of an area, and, with the number of management valves on our networks soaring over the past few years, it is increasingly challenging to optimise areas to the satisfaction of all parties. How can we create a common design for the pressure in an area which considers all stakeholders and factors, for example; burst reduction, leakage reporting, network resilience and customer satisfaction?
What does a comprehensive list of factors for design look like?
The creation of realistic designs for pressure control that consider all stakeholders is important to ensure that these designs are sustainable in the longer term. What should our design standards be for pressure management schemes?
Factors such as overall pressure, pressure variation and network calming, maintaining pressure to large customers, and firefighting flows are all significant, but what else could influence the design?
How can we create designs that consider seasonal variations in flow and are sustainable in the long term? How can we manage these factors by using advanced controls and what are the control options available and their limitations, e.g. fixed outlet, time-dependent, flow curve, closed loop?
How should we test the robustness of designs onsite before and during implementation, and how do we implement new pressure regimes with minimum effect on customers and other stakeholders?
With a number of PRV and control systems available on the market, how resilient is the training available for both onsite teams installing and maintain controllers and the office-based teams using software to manipulate and manage pressures in area? Do we fully understand the capabilities and limitations of some of these systems? This poses a particular challenge for water companies with only a handful of a particular system installed as part of a trial or small-scale purchase and results in areas not being managed effectively.
Water companies have large numbers of pressure management schemes on their network, which all need monitoring to understand if we are maintaining the original design. This can often rely on relatively simple monitoring (e.g. average pressure at critical points) or no monitoring at all in the network. This often results in schemes not being maintained and ‘drift’ away from optimum design occurring as pressure is impacted by seasonal events, customer complaints or as part of network activities like burst repairs.
How can we monitor the pressure in an area against its design, flagging anomalies so we make the most of experienced and skilled analysts, rather than relying on analysts to ‘paint the forth road bridge’ by constantly working their way through all areas and manually checking areas against an unspecified design?
PRV maintenance forms a challenge for many water companies. How can we create a standard ‘MOT’ for control valves, ensuring that when a site is visited all necessary checks and services are carried out?
Manufacturers are now providing an increased amount of data indicative of a PRVs condition and performance, including valve actuations, top pressure and transient/higher frequency data, how can we review this data regularly to ensure that ‘just in time’ maintenance is carried out when we start to see assets deteriorating?
With inconsistencies in terms of data provided from different manufacturers, how can we make sure analysts can properly interpret the results and set up simple alarms and monitoring to establish what good looks like and draw their attention to areas of concern?
Transient data has become increasingly available from onsite monitoring over the past 5-10 years, but our analysis skills in this area are still catching up. There is a general lack of understanding across the industry of how we can properly translate measured transient data into risk of asset failure and use this risk to build a business cases for resolution.
What does an ‘OK’ level of transient activity look like and how can we establish processes to quantify its impact on our networks? At what point do transients start to cause lasting damage and how can we separate out these transients for resolution or the introduction of mitigation measures.
How can we establish low-cost monitoring of transients, does this need to be at 128hz or can it be done using less frequent data sampling? For example, event logging or edge analytics providing min/max over a longer time period (e.g. 1 minute).
Dynamo will follow the same well trodden path of our Paradigm Club Project. Discover what out existing club members have to say about their experience.
The response in our organisation has been really positive. We are still at the beginning of a journey but the Paradigm club project is already providing better insights and decisions.
The collaboration between different water companies is really good. Its been great to share ideas and we take a lot away from the sessions.
Its about the way we’ve work together on the solution. We feel engaged in the results and it gives our analysts the confidence to really go after leakage in areas where previously it might have been dismissed as demand.
Why include Dynamo in your data analysis toolkit? We’ve made it simple and highlighted the top six reasons.
