Electricity + Control March 2021

CONTROL SYSTEMS + AUTOMATION : PRODUCTS + SERVICES

Integrated solutions to automate water networks

As South Africa – and the world at large – face growing concerns regarding human and environmental health, conversations about our most precious resource – water – should be front and centre in tackling the challenges ahead. Recognising the importance of water, and the need for responsible and sustainable management of this resource, the focus should be on how to do more with less, as our water sources become increasingly limited. “Water management needs to be more efficient than ever before,” says Quintin Mccutcheon, Digital Transformation Leader at Schneider Electric South Africa. “For water network managers, this means you need to create a water supply that is highly resilient, efficient and sustainable.” Water management is a complicated industry characterised by wide geographical networks, underground infrastructure and fluctuating network demands. “Add to this South Africa’s challenges of aging infrastructure and skills shortages, and it becomes clear why the country lost an estimated 1.1 million litres of water in 2019,” says Mccutcheon. To create resilient, efficient and sustainable water supplies requires automatic management of these potentially fragile, difficult to access, widely distributed water networks. The goal is to establish a system that responds reliably to changing flow and pressure

demands at all points across the entire network. Digital tools can help manage water supply networks by giving operators more visibility into the system, better insights, and improved control. Mccutcheon explains how Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure integrated solutions can improve South Africa’s water management industry. “With EcoStruxure Control Expert – Asset Link, we can put critical business

insights into the hands of network managers and operators more easily than before. EcoStruxure can connect an application down to field devices and take full advantage of digital hydraulic modelling to monitor pressure, flow, quality and other variables across the water network. This allows operators in control rooms to connect to field devices easily, to monitor a dynamic, real-time view of the network. In this way, it also gives them the ability to predict future network behaviour and service disruptions.” Built-in integration of control and supervisory systems makes automating water networks much faster and easier, and it helps implement changes more quickly and accurately down the road.

Quintin Mccutcheon, Digital Transformation Leader at Schneider Electric South Africa.

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