Wastewater Pumping Stations Retrofitting. Development of a Brownfield Industry 4.0 Solution

In the water industry, digitalization and Industry 4.0 have become a favorite subject. New projects and solutions based on Industry 4.0 principles have been developed and can be found integrated in numerous water control systems. But a main topic is the applicability at the level of the control systems built in the past, which are still operating today. Many of these were built without digitalization, autonomous process optimization, or remote communication. The actual wastewater networks must manage many difficult situations due to increases in population, sometimes using the same infrastructure or inflow of stormwater. Therefore, they must prevent overflows, flooding streets, discharging untreated sewage into local waterways. Breakdowns at a sewerage pump station may involve environmental incidents and the costs of a breakdown repair are far higher than maintenance tasks. Energy, maintenance and operation costs are responsible for half of the total LCC (Life cycle cost) of a wastewater pumping station. This material proposes a specific approach for the control systems of existing wastewater pumping stations in municipal areas, to integrate the principles of Industry 4.0 digitalization, with the main goal of reducing LCC, as well as the number of unforeseen events. Another plus is that the proposed retrofitting concepts are transferable to other application purposes.