Qatium
The speed at which you guys at Qatium can make changes is amazing. It’s very different from our experience with other companies.
Derwin Dy
Assistant Director of Water Resources, City of Lakewood, CA
Quick, easy hydraulic model setup for Lakewood, California
Imagine having a digital replica for your city’s water distribution system that any operator, regardless of tech-savviness, can use to quickly test field operations before applying them in the real world.
The City of Lakewood California’s water utility, serving 60,000 customers and 200 miles of water mains, set out to do just that when they partnered with Qatium to translate their complex water distribution system into a simplified, dynamic hydraulic model. The model is easily uploaded to Qatium’s graphic user interface and elevated with GIS and real-time data.
Lakewood’s water network numbers
Qatium transforms difficult EPANET model into easy-to-use digital twin
Lakewood quickly went from a difficult-to-calibrate steady-state EPANET model to an accurate and intuitive digital twin of the city’s water distribution system. Now, any approved operator can quickly see the state of Lakewood’s water distribution system and test operational scenarios and emergency response options by logging into Qatium.
How’d they do it? Despite several failed attempts by third parties to calibrate Lakewood’s steady-state hydraulic model in the past, large deviations between the model results and field data persisted. However, working with existing integrated vendors, such as Specific Energy, Qaitum was able to bring in more live data and use their specialized knowledge to improve the accuracy of the model. It allowed for the model to be calibrated and validated much more quickly and successfully than in the past.
Instead of a planning model that can only represent extreme conditions, Lakewood operators can now access a multi-purpose, versatile digital twin of their system—with all pipes, valves, pumps, wells, and tanks visible and clickable for real-time modeling.
Foresight helps Lakewood operators make daily decisions with confidence
With their newly calibrated digital twin, an easy simulation in Qatium gives operators the quick foresight and confidence they need to prompt healthy discussions before committing to an action.
For example, the team at Lakewood was looking into providing an interconnect with another city in a relatively low-pressure area of their water system, but they didn’t know for sure what their available capacity would be for the interconnection without negatively affecting the pressure in that area. The team knew, however, they could stay on the safe side with a conservative 1000 GPM.
When they ran a simulation in Qatium using a handy time slider set to high-demand hours, the results were reassuring—the system pressure dropped only by a couple PSI. The simulation confirmed their original GPM estimate was conservative, giving them confidence to explore and discuss more options.
Qatium’s water management platform — Synoptic view
Fast operational planning for those with boots on the ground
Qatium is a powerful visual tool for Lakewood employees. While long-time operators often memorize a water system over years of working with it, being able to login from any device and get quick answers to their water-system questions means all operators, even new operators with less familiarity with the system, gain more confidence in their system knowledge and can make more informed decisions, faster. Moving forward, Lakewood’s water utility envisions using the platform day-to-day to actively monitor the status of their network, ask what-if questions, and aid with fire flow analysis, system asset upgrades, and planning.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Qatium’s platform can give your operators a clear and actionable view of your water distribution system, check out what the platform has to offer here.
