Reducing Pump Shutdowns with Live Monitoring and Alerts

Situation

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Pumps are an integral part of the wastewater treatment process. They move massive amounts of water. Keeping pumps operational is necessary to ensure water treatment processes remain online. Serious problems can occur when a critical pump breaks.

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Problem

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At a European wastewater treatment facility, process experts needed a better way to know which pumps were online and which had failed. Using existing methods, the engineers cannot avoid all failures because they do not have a way to monitor the pumps closely. Process experts also do not have the ability to follow-up on all processes simultaneously.

Four inflow pumps in parallel setup in a pump station move raw wastewater to the treatment.

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Solution

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Engineers knew that periods of high vibrations in the pumps could correspond with pump failures. They wanted to monitor the pumps and search for periods of time when the vibration was high.

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Approach

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• Monitor pumps for failures over time
• Search TrendMiner for pump failure and correlate those failures with times of high pump vibrations
• Create advanced alert systems that will notify key stakeholders when pump vibrations are high so process experts can intervene before a shutdown

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Results

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• Using TrendMiner, engineers were to create a live view of pumps in operation in DashHub
• They also were able to identify the golden operating fingerprint, which excluded periods of high pump vibrations

• During periods of high vibrations, process experts received alters that the pumps were outside their golden fingerprint
• Water treatment experts could intervene to smooth out the vibrations in time to prevent a pump shutdown
• Engineers also made a Gantt chart for an overall view of the pump runs in a defined timeframe, so they knew which were running, which had malfunctioned, and how often pumps had problems

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