IFE was established back in 1948 and an organization including over 600 employees and 20 advanced laboratories spread across 38 countries. In this initiative IFE will contribute with their expertise on digitalization, technology validation and optimalization.
NMBU is a research institute with detailed knowledge and competence in circular wastewater systems and in how to collect and utilize nutrients from black water.
Malthe Winje Automation have extensive experience in projects in essential infrastructure especially within the field of water and wastewater. In addition, they will contribute with their knowledge in the interdisciplinary areas between automation, and connective systems for control- and communication.
Scanwater will contribute with the knowledge towards desentralized water and wastewater systems especially towards the critical units in circular wastewater systems.
Horten og Skien municipality will be pilot collaborators and contribute with their knowledge, and participate in discussion groups to ensure relevance in the development process.
Figure borrowed from Lovdata.no
There are commonly known facts within the water and wastewater industry that infrastructure, capacity, climate change and leaks are big challenges to mention a few. There are plenty of challenges to choose from but in this project, we have picked 3 themes which represents relevance:
Main Goals
Develop a scalable technical platform for monitoring and control of de-centralized wastewater treatment – including a tool for dimensioning of upscaled systems and verification of the process performance.
Sub-targets:
Establish a conceptual digital research infrastructure for a de-centralized wastewater treatment facility
Develop digital models for a full-scale facility
Optimise the overall control system based on collected data and models
Why do We need this
As of today, there are no wastewater solutions enabling guided functionality by the use of history, machine learning and complete models of technical infrastructure- for instance a complete municipal wastewater system (treatment plant, pump stations and piping infrastructure).
Furthermore, in existing wastewater systems the integrations of multiple guiding systems are not something that is offered today by conventional suppliers.
The project also includes the development of the cloud platform in addition to a pilot delivery of an application that utilizes algorithms for guidance through cloud services. Activities to expand functionality to include steering of entities that is not under digital control today is also planned for.
As an example, we can mention online control of pumping stations based on factual basis, capacity and requirement of water quality inside the wastewater treatment plant.
In the future this solution will be able to streamline operation and to reduce load on the municipal wastewater infrastructure in a novel and innovative way. Also enable optimal exploitation of resources I the wastewater stream and give status updates on decompositions of contaminating substances.
The end solution will also be able to perform modelling and up/down scaling of system solutions for tailoring future deliveries.
The project is funded by Regionale Forskningsfond- RFF Viken.
If you have any questions you can reach out to us here in Scanwater or Malthe Winje.