The Los Angeles Post

Black & Veatch and Inflowmatix Join Forces to Meet Leakage Challenge

by ·

Partnership’s leading-edge, digitally-enabled approach to water network management offers path to compliance with stringent new leakage reduction targets

REDHILL, United Kingdom, June 18, 2019 – Against a challenging backdrop of increased water scarcity and service resilience, water companies in England and Wales have been tasked with achieving on average a 15 percent reduction in leakage by 2025. The result is the most ambitious leakage programme in 20 years. Success will require leading-edge, digitally-enabled network management of the kind pioneered by a new partnership between Black & Veatch and Inflowmatix.

The partnership will help UK water companies develop ‘healthy,’ resilient water networks, and reduce losses, by combining Black & Veatch’s programme management, logistics, delivery and analytics expertise with Inflowmatix’s unique analytics, patented technologies and dynamic (near time) pressure sensing devices. The first result of this collaboration is SERENE, a service offering for the UK water markets that will provide network insights through a district metered area (DMA) Health Index assessment.

“By assessing where the network is most at risk and exposing its dynamic pressure variability our technologies provide a network behaviour narrative,” according to Inflowmatix’s Dr. Mike Williams, CEO, “This can be used to inform and implement proactive control strategies while expediting the location and resolution of leakage within the network.”

The DMA Health Index provides water companies with the foundation for a data and insight driven strategy to understand how and where investment to reduce leakage can be targeted most effectively.

“New technologies are a key enabler to helping water companies weather a perfect storm of increasing demand, falling revenues and climate change. We partner with companies, like Inflowmatix, who offer the most promising technologies; and help them achieve utility scale and interoperability,” according to Mark Kaney, Asset Management Director, Black & Veatch Europe. “In this way we are helping water companies better understand the risks and potential benefits of trialing and deploying new, innovative technologies.”

The Inflowmatix partnership is the latest example of Black & Veatch’s drive to help clients deliver predictive performance insights, and resilience across their assets – by using leading-edge digitally-enabled real-time decision making, artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

In February 2019 the company announced a tie-up with AI and machine learning experts EMAGIN. In March 2019 Black & Veatch launched a Smart Maintenance business combining technology-driven maintenance methodologies and automation with hands-on utility engineering expertise – to create digitally enabled maintenance teams.

Black & Veatch has also created ECO-X, a cloud-based digital ecosystem, to enable integration with partners like Inflowmatix – facilitating the deployment of digitally enabled solutions across the lifecycle of clients’ assets.