Recently, the waste water industry in the UK has been under scrutiny because of the impact of sewer overflows and unconsented discharge – and the resulting pollution – on communities, wildlife, and the environment. Obviously, waste water treatment is essential to a healthy environment. For utilities, the challenge is how to maintain and improve treatment standards at a lower cost.
As Scotland’s only provider of drinking water and sewerage services, Scottish Water has a huge responsibility to preserve and sustainably manage the country’s water resources – but also to ensure an affordable water supply and reliable waste water disposal for all its customers.
To respond to this challenge and innovate for the future, Scottish Water sought to move from a scheduled maintenance approach to preventive maintenance, with a solution that would improve maintenance efficiency and, crucially, reduce the risk of downtime in its treatment plants, which might cause, in the worst case, the overspill of sewage into natural water bodies.
The condition monitoring solution from Siemens, designed and implemented in cooperation with several partners, has proven to be an outstanding choice and serves as a lighthouse project for preventive maintenance.
The multiple benefits of prevention
The main objective of this collaboration was to prevent unplanned asset and plant downtime in Scottish Water’s waste water treatment plants. By monitoring the condition of assets with advanced algorithms and using real-time data, plant operators can know in advance when an asset is likely to fail due to wear or damage. This gives them the opportunity to proactively fix the issue before an unexpected breakdown occurs.
Thus, preventive maintenance is an essential tool to increase plant availability and asset reliability – but it is also a lever to reduce operational costs. The ability to schedule maintenance allows plant operators to reduce expenses for overtime work to repair a critical asset and for the expedited delivery of spare parts.
In waste water treatment, there are some assets that are critical to plant operation, so when these assets fail, waste water must be transferred to another plant or tankered in and out while the plant is unable to process it. Preventive maintenance will significantly reduce or eliminate all these costs associated with unplanned downtime.
Moreover, monitoring asset health brings additional benefits such as greater transparency into energy consumption and energy efficiency, helping plant operators cut their costs even more.
Facilitating the digital transformation
With all these benefits in mind, it is surprising that today, most assets in waste water plants are still run to failure. One reason for this is that utilities are often concerned about the risks associated with introducing digital technologies into their operations – in some cases due to a lack of in-house resources for digitalization and IT/OT integration.
To enable the digital transformation of its operations, Scottish Water needed technology that was scalable, secure, and easy to install, providing cost-effective monitoring on critical national infrastructure. This is exactly what Siemens delivered, drawing on the capabilities of its Siemens Xcelerator business platform. With Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens supports its partners and users with a curated portfolio of hardware, software and services, a partner ecosystem, and a marketplace that speeds up value creation through digitalization in industry, buildings, grids and mobility.
Co-creating a blueprint for waste water
Together with Capgemini and Processplus, Siemens has designed a solution that can be easily transferred and scaled up for other plants and systems. What should drive the design of any predictive maintenance solution is an assessment of how critical an asset is to the process, followed by identification of the ways in which the asset could potentially fail. The monitoring solution should then ensure coverage of those failure modes. Siemens has codified this insight into a series of templates that reduce the deployment effort at future sites in Scotland or for any other waste water operator.
Reaping the benefits of digitalization
The result is a solution that helps Scottish Water embrace predictive and preventive maintenance to avoid asset failures and also enables advanced process optimization. “The system has been up and running now for just a few months, and we are already starting to realize some of the benefits, having months of early warning on our critical equipment, our pumps, and our aerators,” says Ross Brand, program manager at Scottish Water.
As a result, Scottish Water is very confident that the investment in its asset health monitoring will pay off and enable the utility to meet its targets of a 5 to 15% increase in asset life and a 10% reduction in the cost of responsive asset repairs.
The joint project has not only provided Scottish Water with an open, easy-to-implement condition monitoring system, but the solution can also be scaled up to include more plants and assets. To date, more than 350 assets at 17 sites have been connected to the condition monitoring solution, and more assets will follow shortly.
Nathan Wield, waste water operations manager at Scottish Water, is already looking to the future: “This type of collaboration and being able to work with the technical expertise of Siemens helped us to deliver a scalable solution that we can now take across multiple assets, in both water and waste water.”
March 2023
Contact:
Anja Eimer, Head of Water Business
Adam Cartwright, Head of IoT Applications
Editorial team: Industry Stories