News

Smart monitoring provides clients greater efficiency

Posted on 08 March, 2011 in Stornoway Water News

Stornoway has been designing, manufacturing and installing water and wastewater treatment plants for the resources industry for more than 6 years. There are more than 30 plants across Australia in key resource areas including Queensland’s Surat Basin and Bowen Basin and also Western Australia.

Stornoway is also providing expert ongoing operations, management and maintenance for a number of installed plants.

“We understand the critical nature of these plants to a mine site. Our years of experience have helped us to develop systems and operational support that reflect the needs of the industry,” explains Stornoway Managing Director, Tim Gardner.

“In addition, our smart monitoring technology is helping to optimise plant operation and make monitoring and maintenance easier, more efficient and more effective.

“We know that these systems require constant operational supervision due to variations in the influent as well as the plant’s complexity. This is particularly relevant for our biological wastewater treatment plants which have living organisms used in the treatment process.

“Our tip is that this supervision is best done by a qualified or trained operator so that the plant remains viable long-term and any downtime is minimised.”

Stornoway successfully uses its remote monitoring technology to bring a number of benefits to customers in the smooth operations and maintenance of plants. These include:

• Engineers being able to see the operational status of plants instantly, removing the need to travel to the site to see the plant’s situation;

• Providing greater control of plant operations; and

• Reducing the risk normally associated with small scale, user operated plants in regional and remote locations.

Tim said that the online technology allowed his team to provide regular monitoring and make adjustments remotely to avoid critical plant failure.

“These units operate in tough conditions with high temperatures, wind, dust and changing input sources,” Tim said.

“By being proactive and detecting issues before they happen, we can save the customer costly repairs and downtime. We can also avoid having to travel several days to reach a mine site. Several days of a non-operating plant can cause significant issues for our customers.”

Stornoway’s treatment plants will normally accept wastewater of a quality that complies with authority recycled water requirements.  Some pre-treatment may be required for high strength wastewaters such as those that are high in fats, oil and grease.

“Our experience shows that most plant issues arise due to variations in the sewage and influents (what goes into the system),” Tim said.

“The biggest tip we can give our customers is to be careful about what gets tipped into sinks or down drains on the mine site (such as fats, oils, grease or cleaning products) and to manage the wastes that will eventually enter the system.”

Tim said Stornoway Water’s expert team of specialist engineers and technicians can provide operations and maintenance support as well as provide regular plant maintenance on-site.

“This is another tip we can provide – regular maintenance provides for a far longer plant life and means less potential complications, as we can measure and review input and output flows,” Tim said.

“Our technicians have many years of experience in plant operation and maintenance and this expertise means we can maximise plant operation and performance, minimise risk for our customers, ensure a longer plant life and make things much easier for our customers.”

Tim added that Stornoway Water used the learnings from field operations to provide feedback into designs and procedures so that plant operation and performance continually improved.

 

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