Digital twins for wastewater treatment

The challenge

Wastewater management: a complex industry

With expensive, high-maintenance infrastructures, everything from the changing climate to increasingly tight regulations has an effect on the way both public and private organisations manage water and wastewater.

Beyond this, wastewater transportation and treatment infrastructures – and the way they interact – are getting more complex. Introducing new technologies and treatment processes is vital, but how can organisations ensure they’re performing to the standards they require?

The answer lies with digital twins.

At Royal HaskoningDHV Digital, we’re working to help water management organisations, such as water utilities and industries, develop and implement domain-specific digital twins to enhance our practical industry solutions. With the right applications, they can support engineers, operators, policy makers and managers in innovative ways – ensuring an informed, effective approach to the way the industry operates.

The approach

Digital twins for wastewater management

In wastewater management, being able to improve continuously is fast becoming one of the most important factors in building a treatment process that’s efficient, cost effective and futureproofed. And with the right combination of data and digital technologies, you can do just that.

We’re supporting organisations like yours with technologies they need to build digital twins – virtual representations of assets, processes and environments, which can be used for real-time monitoring, predictions and automated responses. 

The digital twin understands and interprets demand, flow and performance, so you can put those insights to work to mitigate risk, cut your costs and ensure you’re taking the most efficient approach to wastewater management.

The impact

Enabling intelligent wastewater treatment

Nereda is our award-winning wastewater treatment technology; it purifies water using aerobic granular biomass in a single-tank setup. Working with Nereda takes a quarter of the space of traditional sludge-purification installations, and as a standalone solution it can reduce your energy costs by up to 50%.

These treatment processes are enhanced by digital twin technologies. Every Nereda plant is supported by MyNereda, an intelligent modular asset information management platform that collects data from your wastewater operations.

One of the key modules in MyNereda is Aquasuite, our cloud-based machine learning and AI platform. It adds a crucial layer of insight to your wastewater treatment processes. It acts as an autopilot, virtual operator and analyst, automating workflows and assessing the performance of your assets, networks and processes. 

The platform includes tools which monitor wastewater transport, optimise nutrient removal from sludge, and reduce chemical use in sludge treatment.

Using these platforms together creates a rich store of data from your operation. This data can be fed into a digital twin’s algorithms to model potential disruption scenarios, virtually test upgrades and adjustments with zero risk, and introduce automation into your processes.

Through MyNereda and Aquasuite-enabled digital twins of your infrastructure’s components, you can build the optimum wastewater infrastructure.