NIRAS implements three pilot projects in Abu Dhabi within water supply and waste water, aiming at diminishing water loss and to prevent smelling and flooding of sewage inside buildings. The work has led to the development of a ground-breaking management tool for utility companies. Waste water in people’s houses - a smell like rotten eggs, and a 30%-loss of purified, and very expensive desalinated drinking water.
These are some of the problems which the Water and Sewerage Authorities in Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates, has asked NIRAS to help solve.
In order to cope with these problems, NIRAS has been contracted to develop sophisticated monitoring and leakage detection tools and management systems.
Thomas Dueholm Blicher, Task Manager for the Sewerage Component of the pilot projects and Waste Water Expert in NIRAS says about the projects:
“Based on in-depth system descriptions and analyses, we develop and install a real-time model and routines and procedures for leakage detection in the water supply and sewerage systems as well as a management system which the utility companies can use for measurement, analysis and monitoring of the water distribution system.”
The projects are scheduled to be completed during the autumn of 2012. According to Thomas Dueholm Blicher, NIRAS has the prospect of continuing as advisor, once the entire Abu Dhabi capital, with more than one million inhabitants, will be involved.
Catalyst for the HOMIS management tool
Originally, the assignment was a full-scale project covering the entire capital. This has now, for various reasons, been changed to the three pilot projects in question. So NIRAS has already a couple of years of experience with carrying out similar tasks in Abu Dhabi. During these years, NIRAS developed the first prototype of an entirely new management tool for utility companies.
“In the original project the Abu Dhabi authorities requested our help with solving the acute problems of water loss and sewage odour, and at the same time they wished to be able to benchmark the four utility companies involved,” says Thomas Dueholm Blicher and continues:
”This was the starting point for the development of HOMIS. HOMIS is the first system of its kind in the World which comprises all relevant data from water production and water distribution to drainage and waste water treatment plants, and which can be used to optimise operation and management”.
Demand for HOMIS
HOMIS stands for Holistic Management Information System. It can be used by all types of utility companies including in Denmark, where it also has been tested.
Thomas Haurdahl, Chief Consultant at NIRAS and responsible for developing the new tool:
”We have, for example, implemented HOMIS in the Danish utility company Esbjerg Forsyning, where the Management uses the tool to get overview of all three utility branches: Heating, water and sewage disposal as well as to inform the organisation about the state of affairs and developments. In that way, it will be easier for the utility company to find new focus areas and to streamline operations."
Thomas Haurdahl has great expectations for the new tool:
"We have already been contacted by companies from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and thus we see a great export potential for HOMIS."
Facts
Sophisticated real-time models in Abu Dhabi
The real-time models to be set up in the pilot projects in Abu Dhabi consist of several elements.
- A water supply model which manages data from noise loggers. A noise logger is a sort of microphone which by ‘listening’ to the water pipes can detect leakages and their location.
- A waste water model which manages data from both on-line measurements of flow and level in the sewerage system, and for water quality, which is analysed for organic matter, nitrate and sulphur.
- A holistic management information system (HOMIS) which makes it to possible to integrate water supply, sewerage network, heating etc. in one system that provides the user with both information on present status and possible developments i.e. improvements.