Since 2019, Qatium has been working to make digital water management available to all water utilities, big and small. And as part of that mission, it partners with other service providers across the sector to maximize value for shared water utility customers.
Specific Energy, a leader in pump station control and analytics, is such a partner. Specific Energy’s tools can easily integrate with Qatium’s open platform, sharing a wide range of real-time data that enhances the accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of water utility management.
At Qatium, we believe collaboration across the water industry is essential to face current and future challenges. By embracing transparency and cooperation —an approach we call “Open Water”— partnerships like these accelerate innovation, improve accessibility, and create value through collective effort.
Specific Energy’s unique tools
Specific Energy offers optimization tools that help customers save time, money, and extend the life of their equipment. They include:
Dynamic Pump Optimizer (DPO): An analytics platform that assists with the operation and asset management of pumping systems. The platform helps operators visualize current operations and make changes to keep all pumps within their preferred operating ranges (POR) as conditions change. It assists managers by identifying worn pumps and making repair recommendations based on financial metrics. The DPO recommends repairs as soon as it’s economically advantageous, instead of replacing pumps far beyond their useful life or even after complete failure.
Tagger: An easily configurable edge device that allows customers to bring data into the Specific Energy ecosystem for additional analytics. It can additionally be used as a redundant SCADA system.
Efficiency gains through data integration
The integration between Qatium and Specific Energy enables utilities to access high-frequency, real-time data on flow, pressure, valve and pump settings, valve and pump status, and tank levels. The integration is ready-to-go, so it can be leveraged by any shared customer.
Specific Energy’s Tagger transmits the data every second, which is incorporated into customer models instantaneously once it is sent to the Qatium platform. This fast data transmission not only improves operators’ response times, but their effectiveness as well.
But that’s not all: Specific Energy’s Dynamic Pump Optimizer (DPO) works to find optimal pump settings, maintaining optimal pressure while consuming the minimum amount of energy. Optimizing pump settings is important for the longevity of pumps, and accurate pump curve data is essential to understand both how a pump should be operated and when a pump needs to be repaired or replaced, eliminating guesswork and costly, unnecessary maintenance. With in situ pump data so easily available to Qatium via Specific Energy’s DPO, operators can rely on the accuracy of their digital network and know when a pump has reached the end of its lifespan.
Demonstrating the impact of partnership in Murfreesboro
Specific Energy and Qatium’s partnership empowers utilities of any size to create an interactive, real-time view of their water networks. A recent success story from this collaboration was with the Murfreesboro Water Resources Department (MWRD) in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Mike Bernard, VP of Business Development at Specific Energy, was Murfreesboro’s consulting engineer for 20 years before joining Specific Energy in 2020. In fact, he designed most of the pumping systems at Murfreesboro’s Stones River Water Treatment Plant and had worked extensively in the hydraulic model of their distribution system. He introduced Murfreesboro to Specific Energy after spending a decade looking for a platform that could help them better operate and maintain their pumps.
After optimizing pumping operations at Murfreesboro, Specific Energy also applied analytics to the distribution system. Their efforts helped Murfreesboro reduce their water age and disinfection byproducts by moving water differently through the system. The last piece of the puzzle was providing the operators with a digital twin of the distribution system, with Qatium, that showed them how water was being distributed in near real time.
It was always my dream that Murfreesboro’s personnel would be able to navigate their hydraulic model and be able to understand what it was showing. Previous software was too cumbersome and too complex for operators who didn’t spend every day in the program. Qatium has fulfilled a 20-year dream for me, because Murfreesboro is now using the software to make better decisions across their system”.
—Mike Bernard, VP Business Development, Specific Energy
With Qatium, MWRD operators are able to simulate different network operations to see their impact in the physical environment. For example, they can design and adapt flushing sequences to ensure clean water delivery and minimal customer disturbance. As a result, flushing is no longer a cumbersome, wasteful operation — it can now be executed efficiently with minimal effort with a few clicks of the mouse.
It blew my mind. We’re ahead of schedule, and by doing this, we can get a lot more material out of the lines than flushing like normal.”
—Alan Cranford, Plant Manager, MWRD
Qatium and Specific Energy’s integration significantly enhances network operations like flushing by providing operators full visibility of their entire water distribution system, encompassing both the water network and the water treatment plant.
In addition, MWRD has noted improved water quality across their network. Now that operators have a better understanding of the impact of their work, they can mitigate potential water age issues in their tanks.
Another benefit of the digital twin is that it identifies deviations between actual and modeled data. Qatium’s integrated deviation tracker is now being used by Murfreesboro’s consulting engineers to continually improve the hydraulic model to match the actual data. As Murfreesboro incorporates new sources like Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) data into the digital twin, it will continually reduce these deviations and increase confidence in the model’s predictions.
The future of collaboration in the water sector
The partnership between Qatium and Specific Energy illustrates the transformative potential of collaboration in the water industry. By leveraging pre-existing platform integrations, utilities can avoid costly integrations or overthinking — simply plug and play and focus on achieving results. Together, Qatium and Specific Energy are setting new benchmarks for efficiency, sustainability, cooperation and innovation in water management.
At Qatium, we firmly believe that collaborative efforts, particularly within the digital water domain, are crucial for effectively addressing the present and impending challenges confronting utilities and the entire water sector.
To learn more about Qatium partnerships, visit our partner page. For further information on Specific Energy, visit their website here.
