Smart Networking in Poland

Tczów is a small munic­i­pal­i­ty in Poland, rough­ly 120 kilo­me­tres out­side War­saw. It has 4,500 inhab­i­tants and cov­ers an area of 72 square kilo­me­tres. Nev­er­the­less, this small town still man­ages to stand out from oth­er rur­al munic­i­pal­i­ties. High-tech farms, sport­ing facil­i­ties, new roads – may­or Andrzej Wol­szczak has com­pre­hen­sive invest­ment plans for the future. For exam­ple, he insti­gat­ed a year-long series of inten­sive tests in co-oper­a­tion with Wilo Poland for a sys­tem to con­trol and mon­i­tor the pres­sure drainage. Wilo installed a pres­sure drainage sys­tem here ten years ear­li­er. In com­par­i­son, this was not just cheap­er than a grav­i­ty drainage sys­tem, but also per­mit­ted pro­vi­sion to all of the inhab­i­tants. Once in use, it became clear that one pipe was par­tic­u­lar­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to clog­ging. Besides the incon­ve­nience to the inhab­i­tants, it was nec­es­sary to use large amounts of fresh water in order to flush the sys­tem prop­er­ly. The solu­tion first came as a test ver­sion. Tczów thus became the first munic­i­pal­i­ty to test pres­sure drainage with Nex­os Intelligence.

A new control system takes care of the networking

Over 750 pump­ing sta­tions are installed in the house­holds of the small town. 185 of these are mon­i­tored by soft­ware. The use of the new con­trol sys­tem reduces the pumps’ ener­gy con­sump­tion by up to 30 per­cent. This is achieved by dis­tri­b­u­tion of the dai­ly inflow peaks, dur­ing which the sys­tem is under heavy load — such as on pub­lic holidays.
Dur­ing times when the sys­tem is under less load, the soft­ware ensures that the min­i­mum flow rate of 0.7 m/s is also assured in the col­lec­tor pipes to avoid the risk of clog­ging due to deposits. “As soon as a fault occurs, the source of the prob­lem and the rea­son for it can be iden­ti­fied using the fault pat­terns in the sys­tem. For exam­ple, it could be due to clog­ging in the pipes or the rain­wa­ter sup­ply”, says Andrzej Sze­ro­ki, Busi­ness Devel­op­er at Wilo SE and cre­ator of the soft­ware. “Areas where faults have occurred are high­light­ed on the screen and the response time of the munic­i­pal­i­ty main­te­nance per­son­nel is reduced. In addi­tion, the sys­tem can call up dai­ly, month­ly or annu­al sta­tis­tics for the plant.” The basis for the infor­ma­tion which the con­trol sys­tem uses is the loca­tion of the pump­ing sta­tion, the diam­e­ter of the pip­ing con­nect­ed to the sta­tion and its cur­rent sewage lev­el. Based on this, the sys­tem sets the sequence of the pump­ing sta­tion start-up. In this way, the min­i­mum flow rates can be ensured even in times of low sewage quan­ti­ties – also avoid­ing exces­sive counter pres­sure at the end pump­ing sta­tions when there is high amounts of sewage. The soft­ware can be eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed into exist­ing or new sys­tems. It is inde­pen­dent of pump man­u­fac­tur­er and pump mod­el, regard­less of whether pos­i­tive-dis­place­ment pumps or cen­trifu­gal pumps are used.

Pressure drainage systems with Nexos Intelligence

Pres­sure drainage sys­tems can offer a flex­i­ble and sus­tain­able solu­tion where build­ing a sew­er sys­tem is not pos­si­ble or eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable. A fur­ther advan­tage for the oper­a­tors can be found in the low instal­la­tion costs, because there is no need for expen­sive under­ground civ­il engi­neer­ing work. How­ev­er, the drainage sys­tems can also present chal­lenges: usu­al­ly a few or most of the pumps run simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, as the sewage vol­umes vary depend­ing on the time of day or year. Con­se­quent­ly, pump­ing sta­tions are not con­tin­u­ous­ly in oper­a­tion, which means that pres­sure drainage sys­tems trans­port too lit­tle sewage about 70 % of the time. The irreg­u­lar vol­ume flows increase ener­gy costs and cause deposits or even lead to clog­ging in the pipes that the oper­a­tors – usu­al­ly munic­i­pal­i­ties – then have to rec­ti­fy at high cost. The intel­li­gent solu­tion ensures com­pli­ance with opti­mal flow rates in the col­lec­tor pipelines and col­lec­tive pump­ing sta­tions while also min­imis­ing the risk of deposits and clog­ging. The pumps also ben­e­fit from this sys­tem as they oper­ate at opti­mum levels.