Digital Pump Monitoring: Striving for Preventative Maintenance

The digitalisation revolution is driving innovation in many industries from mobility (think Uber, Lime scooters) to healthcare to goods distribution and information technology. Mobile internet, cloud technology, processing power, data analytics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are helping optimise water and wastewater management with the development of data analytics for continuous monitoring of pump performance and the utility’s water network as a whole. Historical records are just snapshots in time; a lot of important information can be missed. Whereas continuous monitoring, which is ‘daylighting’ data which has been unseen perhaps lost in misplaced historical records, gives complete data over all operating conditions and longer periods of time.

Many councils are striving for preventative maintenance over reactive maintenance but are often constrained by limited resources. Councils are looking at how they can obtain value and efficiencies from using their data to get the most out of their assets through preventative maintenance, while achieving their sustainability targets. Continuous monitoring of pump performance looks set to disrupt the market for one-off ‘snapshot’ pump performance testing services.

Most electricity consumed by water utilities is required for pumping water through the various stages of extraction, treatment, and final distribution to consumers. The reality is that many pumps in service run at efficiencies lower than their manufactured state and outside peak efficiencies. If all councils ran their pumps more efficiently, the world can save significant amounts of energy consumption, money and greenhouse gas emissions.

This paper presents the results from a proof on concept pilot for continuous monitoring of pump performance, water network balance and water infrastructure leakage index using SCADA data readings in Info360 software by Innovyze.

Additionally, a pump performance benchmarking database will be introduced which was developed using historical thermodynamic pump performance test data from 66 pumps from three New Zealand water utilities.