Duncan Botting, ABB UK’s head of technology & business development, looks at how ABB is supporting the water industry
The water industry has many challenges to overcome, not least the ever rising cost of delivering product to its end users in a safe, high quality, efficient and economic manner. ABB has many products that serve the entire water industry from control systems, power components, motors and drives through to instrumentation. As a global leader in pioneering research into energy-efficient solutions, ABB continually looks for ways in which to work with its customers to ensure it delivers products and solutions in the future that enable them to meet their aspirations.
This has led ABB to join forces with some of the leading water utilities in the UK – Yorkshire Water and United Utilities – in a three year strategic alliance with EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) to collaborate with academics from seven universities. The project is co-funded by the industrial partners and supported by a grant from EPSRC.
Project Neptune has been conceived to understand how better use of real-time data can be utilised to balance the issues of planning, water leakage, pressure management and energy management. The development of tools, methods and real-time applications will help the utilities to improve the deployment of communicating instrumentation and improve planning, while providing much greater detail of the minute-to-minute operations of their distribution networks. By developing an integrated approach to these issues the power of automation can be harnessed and used to improve the performance of both pro-active and reactive operation and maintenance.
This in turn, it is proposed, will lead to lower costs and higher customer service levels. This is no easy challenge. First, the deployment of large quantities of communicating data collection instrumentation is required to feed data hungry applications that are being developed by leading academics across a range of universities throughout England (Sheffield, Imperial College London, Exeter, De Montfort, Cambridge, Lancaster, and Leicester).
The new applications will be deployed on one of ABB’s newest open platforms, the 800xA system, combined with the closely integrated historian (PGIM) system. The new solution will be trialled on a region of Yorkshire Water’s distribution network to enable real data and issues to be analysed and provide a real evaluation of the project deliverables. This is a major departure from the traditional three year academic study, simulation and final report.
Both academics and engineers from all companies are working closely together to ensure relevant skills and knowledge are used in all stages of design, build and deployment. The project is in its first year of a three year project. Yorkshire Water has provided an overall project manager to drive the expectations towards reality. A small army of researchers, academics, engineers and managers met recently to cement the great team-working environment that has developed throughout this project.
The recent Computing and Control for the Water Industry (CCWI) and the Sustainable Urban Water Management (SUWM) 2007 conference saw the first dissemination event giving water professionals a glimpse of the detail of this complex and exciting project. For further details please visit the Neptune project web page: www.neptune.ac.uk.