Features

Water & Wastewater Finalists: 2014 PACE Zenith Awards

Profiles of the six finalists in the Water & Wastewater category that is sponsored by Bürkert Fluid Systems.

UGL

Eastern Tertiary Alliance

The Tertiary Upgrade Project at the Eastern Treatment Plant, Melbourne is a landmark wastewater and recycled treatment project for Australia, due to many ground-breaking advancements in tertiary treatment.

Through this project Melbourne Water has been able to achieve its two key objectives being the improvement in treated water discharge to the receiving marine environment as well as producing a new high quality Class A recycled water for the benefit of future generations.

The integration of the new tertiary treatment step with the existing secondary treatment plant, the high standard of output water quality required, and the requisite high level of reliability of the plant dictated the need for a very sophisticated control and communication system.

Tahmoor Coal (Glencore)

Tahmoor Coal Recycled Water Treatment Plant

Glencore and SKM have developed a fully automated Air Quality Control System believed to be a first for the Hunter Region's mining sector. The AQCS is enabling Glencore's open cut sites across the Upper Hunter and Ulan to better manage air quality and noise issues through increased awareness of environmental management.

The key component of the AQCS is an environmental forecast summary emailed daily to more than 120 Glencore representatives, who provide this information to their respective sites.

The email includes general five-day weather forecasts, wind conditions for the next two days, predictions of daily dust risk and predicted noise risks at specific locations. 

Columbus Group

Water meter management systems

Columbus water meter management systems are waterflow self-powered dual metering installations with radio Zigbee microprocessors in daisychained meters, to transfer data with a centralised data management and billing system.

Also, in each meter, there's CANBus control of the plugged together flow through plus takeoff valve modules, together with USB sockets and smart phone NFC apps for setup/monitoring.

The hardware is suited to high and low supply pressures including potable, recycled, onsite bores and rain water tanks; has prioritised metered water outlets for peak/off peak water supplies; monitoring for potential leaks; water hammer reduction; other revenue features; and retrofit of existing metering.

Columbus Group

Rediscovering Pykrete for hard rock mining

Pykrete is a mix of sawdust and ice developed in the period of WWII to make robust large aircraft carrier-like floating structures to provide protection for supply shipping in the Atlantic. And SMA (shape memory alloy) will change shape to a predetermined configuration if heated or cooled to specific temperatures.

While SMA is often in wire form, it can also be in wide sheets or narrow chisel-like forms that can transform between two shapes, based on sheet temperature. Specialised 3D printing can produce the shape changing SMA mechatronic consumables at the rock face.

By combining SMA with injected Pykrete (to 'amplify' the ore seam breaking effect), then continuous mining without explosives is feasible.

Columbus Group

Narrow renewable energy with broad & water applications

With millions of kilometers of fencing around the world, usually at a height that is easy and safe to access, (unlike a high roof), then the logical way to tap this energy source is with narrow renewable energy collection and distributed battery units that can be plugged together and mounted on the tops of these fences.

The whole interconnected system including power management is controlled by a USB bus network so (a) high current draw like outdoor hot water kettles can be balanced up with (b) priority 24/7 intrusion sensor systems and (c) on demand stormwater harvesting, pumping to and from water storage tanks, recycling and appropriate filtration to potable standards as required.

Water Corporation

Automated Change Management – MDT Autosave

The implementation of an innovative systems Change Management solution through Schneider Electric in partnership with MDT and the Water Corporation of Western Australia was a both a technical and a major culture change initiative.

The Water Corporations’ field staff, some of them located thousands of kilometers away from Perth metro in Western Australia, now have a fully supported, standardised automated change management application across all intelligent assets with access to a centralised repository for more than 16,000 device configurations all across the state.

It is the largest implementation of the Autosave software solution on a single server in the world and covers device configuration management of water and waste water assets across Western Australia.

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