Intelligent Water Making Strides towards Predictive Analytics

Asset Management • IIoT • Management • Pumps

Intelligent Water Making Strides towards Predictive Analytics

Grant Gerke | March 16, 2017

EXCEL XR metering pumps are designed for the specific chemical pumping requirements of municipal and industrial water treatment.

Last week, I ran across a Smart Water spending forecast from Bluefield Research and this week there’s an interesting post from Jim Gillespie, co-founder of Gray Matter Systems, a system integrator for cloud solutions and predictive analytics. All signs point to an increased spend in this sector for pump and motor sensors, but where will this investment come from?

According to Gillespie and his post on TechCruch, utilities may be able to sell “solutions” to other wastewater operations like the power industry has done. Gillespie cited how the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority has commercialized their intellectual property, giving them a new revenue channel. The water district is commercializing their water ammonia versus nitrate algorithm and selling it other treatment plants, according to Gillespie.

>> More || Smart Water Infrastructure Continues to Grow, but Real Challenges Persist

As I noted last week, new investment dollars are hard to come by but there’s are a lot of new use cases in the wastewater space, see below:

Another IIoT development, a new SaaS application that’s set to launch later this month, will calculate wastewater clarifier tank performance — providing quick analysis on a critical step in the wastewater process. The tool, called ClariFind, alerts utilities as they’re getting close to a failure before they experience it. ClariFind will predict when sludge will overflow and be released. This kind of problem causes EPA issues and fines that can run in the millions of dollars. It will also be able to predict a thickening failure, which is when the effluent doesn’t settle correctly and creates a costly sludge blanket in the tank. ClariFind is just one part of a water operations suite of productivity enhancers — solutions as a service.