Oliver Grievson from Anglian Water, the Director of the Sensors for Water Industry Group and Group Manager Water Industry Process Automation & Control on LinkedIn comments on some the key themes to come out of this year’s SWIG conference.

Oliver Grievson: How do we get the most of the data that we collect as an industry? How do we get “meaningful” measurement? This was the question posed at the recent Sensing in Water Conference hosted by the Sensors for Water Interest Group (SWIG).

The two day conference highlighted several themes on how to get the best of the data that the water industry collects and how to make our measurements meaningful. Chief among those themes was greater collaboration among the difference stakeholders including the water companies, the universities and the supply chain.

The drivers for the use of instrumentation and making measurements meaningful were highlighted in the two keynotes. Despite all of the hard work that the industry has already done including achieving a 99.96% compliance with drinking water standards,  there were still 182 serious, significant or major incidents in 2016 along with a 68% increase in issues between 2012-16. Despite being very good at what we do there is more work to be done.

On the environmental side of the industry work is being done and the conference heard about the difficulties of monitoring the environment that we all live in with the number of samples taken in a year by the Environment Agency creeping into six figures.

"true efficiencies can be made ..through collaboration between all environmental stakeholders and sharing of data"

This of course is never enough and this is where the theme of collaboration comes in. The pressure applied is to make the testing that is conducted everyday more economical whilst maintaining a level of service. Innovation covers part of this using new and more effective sensors - however, it is through collaboration between all environmental stakeholders and sharing of data that the true efficiencies can be made. In the changing world out there where all the different environmental “partners” must work together for the good of the wider environment.

Throughout the conference the development of new sensor technologies, new ways of working and collaboration were discussed. This ranged from the work that was being done by universities that was right on the cutting edge, to companies working together with a large helping of trust to deliver solutions which are typically confined to the laboratory into the field.

An example of this was the use of Boron Doped Diamond (BDD) to deliver more accurate pH measurement. Using diamond to measure pH must seem overkill as it is a parameter that we have been measuring perfectly well since the 19^th century.  However, with the use of material science we can measure with more robustness and more reliability bringing about more efficiencies in the way that we, as an industry, operate.

In the water industry there are challenges and opportunities that affect the industry as a whole and the case study presented on the subject of metaldehyde is one of these.

The chemical, which is used as a molluscicide, is notoriously difficult to analyse in a laboratory environment, let alone online at a treatment works. The case study showed that a collaborative effort with Affinity Water and its supply chain managed to bring a laboratory grade analytical method and convert it to an on-line method capable of managing different inputs into the water treatment process with a project that doesn’t require a full-laboratory staff to run it.

As an industry we are entering a world where the treatment process is being asked to operate at increasing complexity. It is through this type of collaboration that the day to day work of managing the water industry to deliver ways of working to assist in this complexity can help the industry to do the “business as usual.”

No modern conference in instrumentation is complete without the arbitrary discussion on Big Data and managing the data that we gather each day and this year’s Sensing in Water did not disappoint.

The current case study from Severn Trent Water looking at their Spernal & Trimpley catchments is a shining example of the way that the industry can operate. These case studies show that bringing the data that on-line instrumentation collects into something that distils the data down into useable information allows the way that we operate to be refined. It allows the operating catchment including the treatment “factory” and associated system to be managed and operated rather than simply sampled and checked. This allows the factory approach that was originally raised by the Dutch organisation STOWA, where the process is refined and as much of the resource of wastewater is recovered as is possible in the most efficient way, to become a reality. All of this through the use of instrumentation and data.

Sensing in Water this year showed that instrumentation is a vital tool in the water industry but we must get the best possible value from the data that we collect. In order to do this collaboration between water company, academia and supply chain is absolutely essential.