Smart Water Utility

Northern Ireland Water expands asset monitoring program

May 12, 2022

The utility has planned to deploy Samotics’ SAM4 system across a variety of pump types and processes.

Northern Ireland Water has planned to deploy Samotics’ AI-driven SAM4 system for its submerged assets to support a more cost-efficient and sustainable service.

The utility initially selected Samotics’ system to provide insight into the performance and efficiency of its sewage pumps as part of a pilot. After seeing early successes in the program, Northern Ireland Water chose to roll out the SAM4 system to additional sites to explore its capabilities across a variety of pump types and processes.

Ensuring the health of submerged pumps is vital to avoid costly, disruptive repairs and prevent damaging pollution events, but assets’ remote locations can make it hard to acquire high-quality, high-frequency data. SAM4 solves this problem by analyzing the current and voltage signals of electric-driven motor systems using a technique called electrical signature analysis (ESA).

The system’s sensors install in the motor control cabinet, rather than on the pump itself, enabling reliable, remote capture of asset health data. The system also provides superior detection performance for both electrical and mechanical faults, allowing Northern Ireland Water to detect over 90 percent of developing failures up to five months in advance.

SAM4 detected a developing fault in this submerged wastewater pump. Following the detection, the pump was lifted for inspection and the Northern Ireland Water team found that the claw connecting the pump to the discharge piping was hanging on with only one out of eight bolts.

The decision to scale the number of assets monitored by the system was made as a result of significant successes across the pilot program. In the months following pilot’s installation, Samotics detected developing faults in two pumps that could have resulted in the complete failure of these assets. Through early intervention, Northern Ireland Water successfully resolved issues and prevented estimated direct damage to the pumps of over £44,000. Most important, Northern Ireland Water minimized the risk of potential pollution events and their significant environmental impact.

“Northern Ireland Water has been adopting predictive maintenance at the problem sites,” said Paul Foley, M&E field manager at Northern Ireland Water, in a press release. “We selected Samotics and its SAM4 technology as it’s easy to install the hardware in our existing MCC panels, and because the SAM4 dashboard provides us with a lot of useful information.”

In addition to monitoring the health of critical assets, Samotics is also enabling Northern Ireland Water to track pump performance and efficiency in support of its ambitious zero carbon strategy.

Using SAM4’s real-time pump performance curve and energy monitor, Northern Ireland Water can identify targeted interventions that improve energy efficiency with a demonstrable return on investment. This includes optimizing operational processes to reflect performance requirements and replacing pumps with more efficient or appropriate models to realize cost-savings.