[ Webinar Recap ] Advanced Analytics for Water & Wastewater Treatment
Advanced analytics is not new to many industrial manufacturing industries. The Oil & Gas and Chemicals industries have been using analytics for years to gain insights into their operations. Recently, especially given the interruptions due to COVID-19, many companies within other manufacturing industries have understood that it is essential for them to have more business insights from the data their plants are actually collecting. For example, they need to leverage the data their plant historians have collected for years or even decades. And this is true for the Water Industry.
Advanced analytics platforms can provide significant value to the Water and Wastewater sector and its plant managers and process experts tasked with running treatment facilities by helping them to easily tackle common challenges and complex optimization problems and improve asset performance. It provides substantial value by also aiding in energy reduction, knowledge exchange, maintenance costs, regulatory compliance, data availability, and analytics expertise.
The Promises of Advanced Analytics
Not only can an advanced analytics tool help the Water Industry solve process issues, but it can also provide substantial improvement potential:
- Improve your maintenance schedule to reduce maintenance costs and save energy consumption.
- Monitor your pump performance to prevent pump failure and ensure smooth plant operations.
- Automate your findings into early warnings to reduce costs and avoid nitrogen/carbon emission.
- Increase your knowledge sharing resulting in more solved cases and employee efficiency.
- Ensure your data availability by preventing data silos.
- Solve your day-to-day questions without the help of data scientists.
It can also help plant managers and process experts realize additional improvement projects that they might have found on their own.
Now onto the How…
Bring in the Data Scientists
Just kidding!
Usually when a company is faced with operational challenges and decides to use captured data to gain insights to improve processes, their first instinct is to think: “We need data scientists… and now!”
However, there are a few of issues with this approach:
- There are a limited number of available data scientists.
- These experts are not familiar with manufacturing data because in essence they are “foreigners” to industrial processes and need help understanding the data.
- These projects can be time-consuming and expensive.
What happens then is that process experts must explain to the data scientists what the data means in relationship to process intricacies. This results in a lot of back and forth meetings between the data scientists and the process engineers and operators who must explain how to interpret the data, so the data scientists can tackle the data analysis.
With these time-consuming frustrations, especially with not having enough data scientists, a logical conclusion is to empower all the process experts with data analytics. TrendMiner’s self-service analytics tool allows the people who know about the processes to interpret the data themselves. They have the process expertise and skill sets to fully leverage the data.
As a user, you’ll be able to do the analytics yourself, and you don’t need to be a data scientist or an expert in mathematics, statistics, or computer science. You’ll be able to use TrendMiner without any background knowledge. You’ll be able to combine your process expertise with a simple, fast, accessible, and easy-to-use tool to gain insights into your time-series data, yourself.
Use Cases from the Webinar
In our recent webinar, “Advanced Analytics for Water & Wastewater Treatment”, TrendMiner Data Analytics Engineer Daniel Münchrath demonstrates how our self-service analytics is being used to optimize Water Industry processes.
Use Case 1: Monitoring Pump Performance
Plant managers and process engineers take note. This use case is based on finding the desired operation zone of the sewage pump and shows how TrendMiner allows process experts to monitor their assets to schedule maintenance at the right time.
With our software, process experts can:
- reduce equipment cost
- reduce downtime
- avoid unwanted process states
To see Daniel demonstrate this, register for our webinar on demand watch it at the 22:22 marker.
Use Case 2: Aeration Elements
The aeration elements in the biological wastewater treatment suffer from fouling effects which leads to decreased oxygen concentration and decreased nitrogen/carbon conversion rates. This use case shows how TrendMiner can be used to create a clear overview of the oxygen concentration within the plant and how plant managers, engineers. and operators can use the achieved situational awareness to schedule the maintenance/cleaning process in time.
These benefits are substantial:
- improved regulatory compliance
- reduced energy cost
- improved maintenance schedule
To find out how to increase energy efficiency with improved maintenance scheduling, check out the webinar on demand at time stamp 33:39.
“Right after the start of COVID-19 lockdown TrendMiner clearly showed a change in the early morning peak of wastewater to our sewage treatment plant…This tool gives great insights of the performance in our plants and helps our engineers find areas for performance improvements.”
Do Your Job Faster, Better, Smarter
As demonstrated in the webinar, TrendMiner’s platform allows those of you in the water industry, or working with water and wastewater assets, to be able to:
- visualize data
- use its search algorithm and pattern recognition to gain process behavior insights
- find root causes
- set process monitors and alarms to alert process experts about potential deviations so they have time for corrective actions
- make predictions about future process behavior
- incorporate process contextual information, so the entire team has a better understanding of operations
