The global water challenge is incredibly complex and one that becomes more pressing as the world's population grows. Securing ample amounts of water, ensuring it's is secure and that it's supplies are resilient, is a major challenge across the globe. Managing the fragile balance between supply, demand and demographics is a critical infrastructure challenge and will continue to be in the years ahead.

Water Management is facing serious challenges with deteriorating infrastructure, storm and flood management, and emerging contaminants to name a few.  One of the top issues in the water industry is the aging infrastructure. The aging drinking water and wastewater infrastructure is in poor condition and systems require investments in maintenance, repairs and upgrades.  Many of the components in the drinking water and wastewater infrastructure are reaching the end of their useful life.  The condition of many miles of pipelines is unknown, with some pipes dating back many decades.  With respect to leaking pipes, the current rate of replacement or renewal of buried infrastructure is less than 1 percent per year for most utilities.

For Water Management Companies these issues pose a daunting challenge that require more cost-effective assessments (e.g., leak detection, water quality monitoring, prediction models of condition systems, asset management models) and rehabilitation techniques.

Organizations and systems that operate water management processes have long been dependent upon Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems to monitor water processing and redistribution systems. With the increasing amount of distributed assets, maintaining these complex infrastructures is becoming cost prohibitive and error prone.

• The number of assets to be monitored and connection points often exceeds the scalability of the existing SCADA database.

• Asset additions, removals, and new connections are becoming much more frequent, and as a result it is increasingly more difficult to guarantee accuracy with the SCADA network model.

• Underlying data structures are typically not set up optimally to handle complex statistical approaches, critical for recognizing and predicting insights;

• Most SCADA systems have relatively low fidelity of measurement and data storage ranging from a data point every 10 minutes to an hour or longer;

• In some cases, SCADA systems cannot reach the field devices due to communication issues, resulting in the inability to capture high fidelity data for that specific period of time; 

• In the field, SCADA systems require manual mapping of register values resulting in a large number of improperly mapped values as well as a large number of values that are never sent back or received;

• SCADA systems also pose a huge barrier to real-time scientific monitoring of critical assets, given its current state of data availability and quality.

The water market is making a shift to a more technologically driven approach as government and private bodies increase pressure to better manage usage, treatment and security. One of the ways municipalities and businesses are tackling these challenges is through using the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to increase availability and security. There are massive opportunities for IIoT through gathering data from sensors to do things like better manage flow during peak demand, only run pumps and blowers when necessary, and ensure water and wastewater facilities are secure.

Zotera provides a comprehensive data collection and analytics platform to organize and react to vital information from sensors embedded across the water and wastewater ecosystem. The Zotera platform is hosted on a cloud-based infrastructure designed to integrate leading-edge tools for rapid deployment.

The Zotera platform leverages best in class software applications for remote asset monitoring, energy analytics and water security, and integrates these solutions through APIs. Zotera Analytics, the can inform operators which equipment can be turned down or off entirely, and which loads can be shifted to other time periods. By integrating all of this data, critical decisions relative to assets and facilities can be made at the right time and place in order to optimize security and reliability.

 

 

Managing supply and demand is of the utmost importance in building a sustainable water network, and the Zotera solutions are uniquely well-suited to address this exact issue. Our innovative solutions have been developed using IIoT "best practices" and our seamless integration of key technologies provide the information that enables mission-critical business decisions. We offer an end-to-end Assets, Facilities, & Infrastructure Management solution that provides the foundation for seamlessly and securely connecting devices, delivering trusted data to the cloud or data center, and delivering value through real-time analytics. Our solutions enable data to be collected in any aspect of a water system that can be measured with sensors. Water data in conjunction with machine learning technologies can determine predictive maintenance of pumps, distribution networks, or storage cisterns. Through these types of solutions, water managers can gain the ability to repair breaks within a smart water system before incidents occur, saving capital and material cost and increasing ROI.

 

Solution Examples:

Wastewater

• Sensors in a wastewater treatment plant can improve operational efficiency by providing real-time data for water flow, air/water temperature, humidity, water quality monitoring, bio-gas distribution, energy output of assets, and more

Treatment

• Sensors to determine hydraulic modeling that  identify issues with volume, quality, or pressure within the system, enabling greater operational efficiency of a plant.

• Sensors can also detect water quality, flow, leaks, and energy usage in cisterns and water pumps.

Delivery

• Water monitoring can help reduce Non-Revenue Water (NRW) by mapping and modeling water distribution networks, identifying leaks, and helping to manage inaccurate metering.

Infrastructure

• Sensors in sewer systems that can take in data regarding water levels to signal a mechanism to divert water from one part of a sewer system to another when inundated preventing flooding

Conveyance

• Sensors in an aqueduct to provide real-time data for water flow, temperature, humidity, water quality, distribution, pumps, gates, and more

Conservation

• Sensors to determine water storage levels in lakes or reservoirs to provide a water manager with data about water quality, temperature, and flow

• These systems can map an aquifer, which is a crucial yet largely unknown data point for many water managers