The nations of the Arabian Peninsula are well aware of the need to preserve and protect water as an extremely scarce natural resource. They lead the world in the installation of seawater desalination systems and the regeneration and reuse of wastewater.
The City of Qatar is responsible for the planning, design, contracting, construction and management of all infrastructure projects and public buildings in the country. This includes the construction and supervision of roads, highways, sewer systems and public buildings such as schools and hospitals.
The situation in which Qatar was in 2017 was that of collecting and evacuating wastewater on the one hand, while on the other quality water flows were used for secondary uses. These secondary uses, such as the irrigation of green areas or the thermal exchange in air conditioning systems, do not require the extremely high quality of the water produced in desalination systems; the non-reuse of wastewater and the use of high quality water for secondary uses represented a double waste of the nation’s scarce water resources.
Aware of this situation, and following the guidelines of the “Qatar National Vision 2030” program, Qatar built wastewater regeneration facilities to provide a reclaimed water supply (TSW – Treated Sewage Water). These waters are not suitable for human consumption but are suitable for use as a secondary flow in heat exchangers of air conditioning systems.
Nexus and Qatar National Vision
The City of Qatar selected NEXUS Integra as a management platform for the utilisation facilities of these reclaimed waters.
NEXUS Integra is a robust and agile Big Data platform that collects, manages and takes full managerial and technical advantage of massive amounts of data. It can perform the ingestion of information in real time from various sources simultaneously; It supports IoT (Internet of Things) sources and proprietary technologies (SCADAs, PLCs, fieldbuses, sensors, etc.).
NEXUS Integra applies advanced algorithms to guarantee the quality of the stored data, also allowing the visualisation of the information in predefined control panels while also allowing the user to design their own, thanks to its intuitive and widget-based dashboard interface.
In addition to technical and sensorisation information, NEXUS Integra accesses information from geographic information systems, maintenance and preservation operations, asset management data as well as any other information available in the organisation that may be interrelated with the previous ones.
Currently, the NEXUS Integra platform developed by go-aigua receives and handles more than 6 billion data inputs annually, thanks to its real time variable monitoring mechanisms as well as its ability to integrate information from most industrial protocols operating at the sensor and installation level.
A more water-efficient Qatar
The NEXUS platform supervises the distribution of reclaimed water and its delivery to the cooling systems of public government buildings. The uses to which the reclaimed water is destined are complementary over time, in the sense that the air conditioning works mainly during the day while the green areas are irrigated during the night.
The NEXUS platform currently optimises the use of reclaimed water by adjusting service pressures and controlling circulating flows and monitoring possible losses. It also predicts, based on experience and through guided learning algorithms, the expected demands for each use.
Water Twin
Through NEXUS Integra’s platform deployed over the city’s assets, Nexus Water Twin, another solution powered by go-aigua, accesses the huge information stored in the Big Data system and integrates in a single environment all the gathered data related to the collection, treatment, distribution, use and return of water systems.
On this information integration route, a set of vertical applications offers specific solutions to, for example, optimise production processes or perform strategic controls of the business technical reality. It includes management of alarms and events, generation of reports and graphs as well as predictive analysis of machinery failure.
The NEXUS Water Twin Solution, like all the components of the go-aigua suite, offers Qatar’s operative unites great freedom to configure the visualisation and exploitation of the data, so that it is the end user himself who, if he wishes, personalises the applications to his specific needs.
