Email: [email protected] Academic and Industrial affiliations: University of Sheffield & Siemens Title of research project: Decoding Distribution Data
Water utilities are increasingly turning to wireless sensor networks to assess water quality within drinking water distribution systems yet little knowledge exist regarding how to extract information from these data sets. Through analysing multiple real-world DWDS data sets, this project aims to undertake a thorough investigation of what value can be extracted from these data sets in order to decode the data and transform it into actionable information that can inform about asset and water condition.
Email: [email protected] Academic and Industrial affiliations: The University of Sheffield and DCWW Welsh Water Title of research project: Service Reservoir Integrity
Service Reservoirs (SRs) are critical infrastructures within Drinking Water Distribution Systems (DWDS) and are known to contribute to the degradation of drinking water from treatment to tap. Maintenance of SRs is currently carried out on purely time-based schedules but this approach is not ideal: inspections and cleaning could be carried out when unnecessary, resulting in higher maintenance costs, or failures could run for a long time prior to intervention and cause further issues downstream the DWDS. Consequently, there is a need to move beyond time-based maintenance and towards a more efficient preventative system. This research aims to address the knowledge gaps in assessing SR performance and identifying the root causes of failures, generating information to inform proactive asset maintenance. The starting steps in developing this project have been to review the main problems affecting SRs and their causes, investigating real time monitoring technologies and analysing historical microbial data collected at a case study. First results suggest that analysing time series of bacteria concentration, counting significant peaks at both the inlet and outlet, can serve as a basic assessment of SR performance; however, this project aims to go beyond only bacteriological water quality to understand the big picture of SR performance. To reach this objective, future steps will be to explore multiple physical, chemical, and microbial parameters to collectively indicate performance and condition of SRs.
Email: [email protected] Academic and Industrial affiliations: Cranfield University & Severn Trent Water Title of research project: Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment
An unintended consequence of biological wastewater treatment is the emission of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Further, natural and induced biological activity in biosolids also results in further emissions such that wastewater treatment works contains a number of point sources where greenhouse gases will be emitted. Current approaches to qualify such levels are based on static emission rates that do not reflect changes in operation or control that may reduce the total quantity of GHGs emitted. The most direct and effective way to eliminate, or at least reduce, scope 1 emissions is to utilise abiotic processes for the treatment of wastewater. However, the efficacy and practicality of doing so is unclear, especially framed against the fact that the majority of the existing infrastructure is based around biological processes which inherently emit GHG. Accordingly, there is a need to establish both (a) future flowsheets that can deliver operational carbon neutrality to ensure future development work is focused towards the right technologies, and (b) establish bases to reduce GHG emissions from existing infrastructure, so that emissions can be minimized.
