Exterior of the building of the headquarters of the Ruhrverband in Essen

12 เม.ย. 25664 min read

Smart sensors enhance operating reliability

In one of Europe’s largest conurbations, the Ruhr Region, the Ruhrverband makes sure that enormous quantities of waste water are transferred and treated reliably. As part of this process, 125 pumping stations pump the waste water to a total of 63 waste water treatment plants. For a long time, the pumps used to be functionally tested by hand, with service personnel having to travel long distances to do so. For that reason, the Ruhrverband looked for an automated solution together with KSB.

Keeping a constant eye on pumps

As a result of the high population density and the large number of commercial and industrial enterprises, the Ruhr Region’s water consumption and therefore volume of waste water per unit area is about seven times higher than average in the Federal Republic. This poses major challenges for the water management infrastructure and leads, above all, to a large service effort in connection with pumping station maintenance. However, KSB has developed a tool that enables all of the pumps to be monitored from one central location.

Ruhrverband

For over 100 years, the Ruhrverband and its water management infrastructure have been guaranteeing that the Ruhr River, with its relatively small volume of water, can supply the water needed by the entire region. For this purpose, within the river’s catchment area of 4478 square kilometers, the water management association operates more than 800 water management installations, including eight reservoirs and five impounded lakes. The Ruhrverband provides 63 plants with 125 pumping stations for waste water transfer and treatment.

Building containing Fröndenberg Pumping Station from the outside — One of 125 pumping stations: Fröndenberg Pumping Station

Rendering service trips unnecessary

Prematurely worn bearings or pumps clogged with solids after a storm: faults of this kind could only be identified in the past by means of a local diagnosis by hand or from a general fault alarm. What was needed was a solution that would enable precise diagnoses to be made from a remote location and would render preventive service trips unnecessary.

Detailed remote diagnostics

The Ruhrverband and KSB have been working together as partners for decades. Ideas and suggestions for optimisation coming from the customer enable KSB to continuously adapt its products and services to the actual needs of its customers and to prepare them early on to meet future requirements.

In the case presented here, KSB recognised the advantages that would be gained by the Ruhrverband if the service trips could be dispensed with. Also, remote monitoring of all of the pumps can deliver much more precise fault analyses than are possible with standard warning devices. This enables the Ruhrverband’s service engineers to concentrate on their actual maintenance work instead of spending unnecessary time on inspection trips.

KSB suggested that their intelligent KSB Guard monitoring tool be deployed for monitoring the pumps. This had already succeeded in proving its usefulness for other customers. For this purpose, KSB gave the Department for Maintenance Management of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (IME) at the Ruhrverband a few KSB Guard systems for a practical trial. The sensor unit and the dedicated gateway can be installed by the customer without any prior knowledge and with little effort - even on pumps from other manufacturers. Equipment set-up, commissioning and subsequent monitoring are carried out with an easy-to-use smartphone app or a PC.