Challenge
NRW losses and bursts are a major cost to water companies. Portsmouth Water is keen to prolong the life of the mains by locating leakage at source by identifying where it will happen, root causes and reducing the number of leaks. The strategy now focuses on prolonging the life of critical assets by introducing calming measures and implementing strategies to mitigate leakage at source.
Portsmouth Water were keen to focus on proactive monitoring and detecting issues before they worsened or became critical operationally. Magnified by the unprecedented demand over the previous months and driven by Covid-19, demand stayed at weekend levels with no reduction during weekdays. Higher demand caused excessive strain on the network and on pressure management in particular.
Solution
Inflowmatix and Portsmouth Water identified a unique opportunity to mitigate potential failures in their Pressure Managed Zones by extensively deploying InflowSense™ Edge high frequency pressure monitoring devices coupled with its
new ‘service’ based product offering arboricity™. Approximately 50 InflowSense™ Edge devices were deployed alongside existing sensors in order to provide temporal and spatial coverage of the zones, to comprehensively characterise the
Network.
arboricity™ has a state-of-the-art hydraulics analytical engine built in, and uses this engine to ensure outcomes are always meaningful and drive behavioural change.
Understanding the network and its hydraulic behaviour is often embedded knowledge within the workforce, but access to wider groups in the company is limited. arboricity™ generates this understanding through the near real-time calibration and continuous refinement of hydraulic models. Recognising personnel have different oversight of their assets and network, individual, targeted registration enables stakeholders to receive relevant actionable outcomes.
The arboricity platform is giving us the ability to understand how our network is performing in a lot more detail
Jim Barker
Head of Water Resources, Portsmouth Water Ltd
Results
arboricity™ quickly demonstrated insightful results building a model which learns network behaviour and identifies anomalous activity. This was evidenced through analysis of the Westergate area where early intervention would have avoided a significant PRV malfunction which led to multiple bursts and impacted a significant number of properties several hours later.
Another area, Staunton Street showed a high CPIS™ measurement, investigation identified pumps from apartment blocks were causing the anomalous activity, calming measures were introduced dramatically reducing CPIS™ scores to a more acceptable level and mitigating potential failure of the network.
Inflowmatix is now working with Portsmouth to implement hybrid hydraulic and statistical tools across the region to further mitigate costly and disruptive events.
