Wallingford Software : Case studies

CSO work on the River Fal

From 1999 to 2003 Pell Frischmann worked as consultants to South West Water on a programme of combined sewer overflow (CSO) improvements within the Falmouth catchment. Pell Frischmann had been involved in capital programme work in the catchment for the previous five years, and much of this work included significant hydraulic modelling. The consultancy was also responsible for the hydraulic modelling, evaluation study and the design of the sewage treatment scheme as part of a design/construct partnering team comprising South West Water, Alfred McAlpine, Purac and Pell Frischmann.

British Waterways Develops Best Practice Hydraulic Methods for British Canals

British Waterways (BW) manages over 2000 miles of canals and river navigations throughout the UK. Its network of waterways is diverse in character in terms of channel characteristics, aquatic habitats and historic structures present (i.e. with 4763 bridges, 60 tunnels, 397 aqueducts, 549 locks and 89 reservoirs). BW controls the supply and distribution of water to the canals in order to maintain navigation, conserve habitats and for sale to commercial customers. The network also provides a valuable land drainage function with 30% of the catchment area of England & Wales draining into a waterway owned or managed by BW.

Integrated sewage management to reduce pollution load in Berlin

Simulation tools helped develop an integrated approach for Berlin’s combined sewage system in which sewage overflows pose risk to groundwater and surface water quality, as described by Kai Schroeder and Erika Pawlowsky-Reusing of the KompetenzZentrum Wasser Berlin.

InfoWorks CS aids critical harbor improvement predictions for Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor and the quality of its water have been the subject of much debate. The harbor is now seen as a valued area of Hong Kong, rather than a dumping ground as in the past.

The Environmental Protection Department (EPD) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China plays an important role in making public aspirations a reality. Many positive improvements have been made in the central and eastern parts of the harbor, as well as in beaches, rivers and streams that affect the area. However, much more work and investment is needed to improve water quality throughout Hong Kong.

Severn Trent Water exploits InfoNet’s import/export capabilitie

Severn Trent Water (STW) is the world´s fourth-largest privately owned water company. Serving 8 million customers across the heart of the UK, it stretches from the Bristol Channel to the River Humber, and from mid-Wales to the East Midlands. STW’s physical size is summed up well by the fact that its sewer network is built of nearly 1 million pipes covering 343 drainage areas.

A very large utility implies a very large data storage requirement, and that is true of STW’s central asset database, UADMS (Underground Asset Data Management System). This database, a mainframe GIS system based on ESRI software, contains details of all STW’s sewers and water mains.

InfoWorks extends capabilities for Flemish Basin modeling system

AMINAL afdeling Water of Belgium manages 1200km of the non-navigable watercourses in Flanders. As part of its responsibility to identify areas of flood risk, AMINAL is implementing Wallingford Software’s InfoWorks RS software to carry out large scale modeling of the region.

An initial programme of modeling to create flood risk maps began in 1995 and has been carried out by local consultancy firms using the ISIS and InfoWorks software. To date, 62 sub-catchments across Flanders have been modeled, and in all some 2000km of completed models are now available.

Cambridge Modeling helps network management

Cambridge, UK, is a typical medium size town full of history. Boasting one of the oldest Universities in the world, it also comprises the internationally renowned Addenbrooke´s Hospital, a shopping area, residential properties, some industrial premises and even a small airport. Water was first piped to Cambridge in 1325 when Franciscans laid a lead pipe a distance of 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from a natural spring. Today Cambridge Water services 293,350 customers and supplies an average of 19.5 million US gallons (74,7 megaliters) of high quality drinking water per day.

Modelling infiltration and overland flow

HartFair Limited has been using InfoWorks CS version 4.5 for verification and optioneering of sewer models where infiltration and overland flows played a significant role in property flooding.

The example area is 140ha of urban dwellings containing 9000 residents, built in the 1950s and 60s. The catchment drains eastward along the line of the Callow Brook. The area of interest was the separately-drained, north west corner of the site. In this sector there had been four major flood events in the past 14 months during rainfall with return periods of between 30 and 100 years. Before the development was built there were a number of very small tributaries to the brook – shallow valleys, which were retained as features, with the foul sewer running in the bottom of one of these ditches.

Sediment Transport and Water Age Modeling at Wessex Water, UK

In March 2004, Wessex Water reported three failures for iron content in the water of one of their Water Supply Zones. This resulted in an undertaking to the DWI (the UK’s Drinking Water Inspectorate) on behalf of the Secretary Of State to provide proposals to resolve these. Wessex Water is the regional water and sewage treatment business of the south west of England, treating and supplying drinking water to 1.2 million people. The Water Supply Zone where the failures occurred is near the town of Calne in Wiltshire, and is supplied from a local service reservoir.

SIAAP adopts InfoWorks CS for Paris area wastewater planning

Wallingford Software, a leading developer of hydraulic modeling and network data management software for the worldwide water industry, has announced that SIAAP (Syndicat Interdépartmental pour l’assainissement de l’agglomeration parisienne, a major French ‘collectivité’ in wastewater management) has purchased InfoWorks CS, the leading software solution that integrates asset and business planning with urban drainage network modeling. InfoWorks CS provides water utilities with a uniquely effective tool with which to undertake hydrological modeling of the complete urban water cycle.

System modeling for integrated catchment management in Buenos Aires

The catchment of the culverted streams that cross Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, covers a total of 30,000 hectares and contains 3.5 million inhabitants. It sits on the vast delta of the La Plata river (the River Plate), across the water from the country of Uruguay.

The city is a very dense and consolidated urban area with a complete culverted drainage network that dates from between 1919 and 1940. Prior to this the original open watercourses used to discharge either to the La Plata or Riachuelo rivers. The city’s drainage network is a separate system apart from in the old, central area of the city where there is a combined sewer and storm network. This area accounts for just 8% of the total catchment.

Severn Trent Water turns to InfoNet for CCTV data storage

Introduction

Since mid-2003 Severn Trent Water has been developing a sewer asset database using InfoNet, Wallingford Software’s network information system. The target benefits identified for the InfoNet database were:

Assessing data from numerous surveys in a single environment when resolving system related problems, particularly during verification
Better management of survey data during model build
Better audit trail of surveys
Ascribing confidence scoring to surveys
Providing a mechanism to annotate during the verification process why specific confidence scores were given to each survey
Reducing desk clutter with a single online source of network asset data.

As part of the development of the InfoNet database, it was proposed that it should also be used it for CCTV analysis. A pilot project was set up to assess two factors:

how InfoNet compared to existing methods for storage, indexing and analysis of CCTV survey data
whether having CCTV readily available through InfoNet helped the model building and verification process.

The Drainage Area Plan (DAP) study for the town of Scunthorpe was chosen for the InfoNet test project, with the objective of assessing the value of InfoNet and identifying any specific improvements that would lead to further benefits.

Athens – an Olympian challenge

As part of the preparations for this year’s Olympic games EYDAP, the water and sewerage corporation of Athens, was tasked with finding out how the 28th Olympiad would affect its ability to meet required levels of service for water supply and wastewater provision in the city and nearby regions.

The corporation commissioned Atkins Consultants in the summer of 2000 to help address the supply/demand and sewerage issues associated with staging an event of the magnitude of the Olympics.

InfoWorks meets modeling needs of Gosford City Council

Gosford City Council in New South Wales, Australia, has joined the growing list of Australian local authorities, utilities and consultancies to select InfoWorks as their hydraulic modelling software platform.

Located between Sydney and Newcastle, Gosford City Council is the largest non-metropolitan water authority in NSW, serving a population of approximately 160,000. The Water and Sewerage Directorate of Gosford City Council provides and manages the town water supply and sewerage services for the Gosford City Council area.

Working smarter at South Staffs Water

Wallingford Software, a leading developer of hydraulic modeling and network data management software for the worldwide water industry, today announced that South Staffs Water has replaced its existing modelling solution with InfoWorks WS, the hydraulic modeling solution for water supply and distribution. South Staffs is one of the UK’s original private water supply companies, formed in 1853 to provide water to 1.23 million residents within a 1490km2 area of South Staffordshire, in the Midlands.

WSACC gains the benefits of a common modeling platform with InfoWorks CS and WS

The Water and Sewer Authority of Cabarrus County – WSACC – was established in 1992 to support five jurisdictions that lie within the same hydraulic basin in North Carolina, namely the county of Cabarrus, the cities of Concord and Kannapolis, and the towns of Harrisburg and Mount Pleasant. The primary planning agent for water and sewer facilities in the area, WSACC provides wholesale wastewater transportation and treatment, and may plan for the provision of wholesale water for some or all of its jurisdictions. The annual operating budget of WSACC is close to $12million.

Hydrodynamic Modeling of the Lower Mekong River and Delta

For the past three years Halcrow Group Limited has been involved in developing a large hydrodynamic model of the Lower Mekong River including the Great Lake in Cambodia and the delta in Vietnam. The model has been built as part of a decision support system intended for use by the four member states of the Lower Mekong Basin: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos PDR. The system has been developed as part of the Water Utilization Program (WUP), which is intended to help the Mekong River Commission (MRC) member states to implement key elements of the 1995 Mekong Agreement. It will provide the technical and institutional capacities required for longer-term co-operation for sustainable management of the basin´s water and ecological resources.

InfoWorks RS models the Juru River, Malaysia

Jabatan Pengairan & Saliran, better known as JPS, is Malaysia’s Department of Irrigation and Drainage. With fourteen state offices right across the country, it has four core areas of responsibility: Water in Agriculture & Food Production, Protection of Property and Life from River and Coastal Forces, Water in Environment Enhancement, and Water as a Resource.

To fulfill these responsibilities, JPS has undertaken a number of initiatives known as Principal Programs:

• Irrigation & Agricultural Drainage

• Flood Mitigation

• River Engineering

• Coastal Engineering

• Hydrology &Water Resources

• GIS

Analyzing floods on the Kerian River, Malaysia

In November 1998 a very severe storm in northern Malaysia raised the water level of the Kerian River. Floodwater breached a bund (a flood defense embankment alongside the flood plain), resulting in massive flooding to many villages and plantations along the river. The flood also caused the North South Highway to be closed for two days.

The Department Of Irrigation and Drainage undertook a study of this event with the objective of understanding the flood behavior and proposing measures to manage similar floods in the future. The most challenging components of the study were to model the breach and the flow of floodwaters across the flood plain, which includes many infrastructures such as roads, highways, a railway line, and other major changes of topographical surface.

Modelling Groundwater Infiltration

The soil conditions at Chichester are predominantly coarse gravels which allow relatively rapid transmission of groundwater. There is a very large seasonal variation in groundwater levels each year in the city and the surrounding areas with typically a 4 to 5 metre difference in groundwater levels from a maximum in winter (usually February) and a minimum which normally occurs in October. These variations in levels are most apparent in the winterbourne River Lavant that flows through the city. This river is entirely fed by groundwater and the volume of flow is extremely variable as can be seen in two photographs below taken at the same location. The winter photo (below left) shows a considerable flow in the river whilst the autumn photo (below right) shows no flow at all.

Flood Forecasting on the Lower Chao Praya River

There is an impression that the development of an operational Flood Forecasting System is a massive task, inevitably requiring extensive and expensive consultancy and a system based on bespoke software and international bank support. The rapid and inexpensive development of an operational Flood Forecasting System for Thailand’s Lower Chao Praya River, built around Wallingford Software’s InfoWorks and FloodWorks suites, shows that a scaled down approach can deliver excellent results within more practical timescales and budgets.

Devonport, Tasmania, moves treatment plant with help from InfoWorks CS

Not all water modeling is undertaken by big metropolitan authorities with large networks and budgets to match. Many of the smaller water authorities are also exploiting the benefits of modeling, to help them operate as cost effectively as possible - modeling is a tool that can help to achieve this on projects of any scale.

On a global scale Devonport City Council can be described as a smaller authority. With a population of just 24,000, Devonport is located on the northern coast of Tasmania, the island state off the southeast coast of Australia. The City Council is responsible for managing roads, garbage, recycling, galleries and museums, and, on the water side, water reticulation, sewers and treatment plants, and stormwater drainage.

Modeling Sewer and River Interaction

BACKGROUND

In the UK, water utilities are required to review the performance of their sewerage assets on a regular basis. The process generally used to undertake investigations and report the findings is a Drainage Area Planning (DAP) Study. Initially sparked by this process, the Shrewsbury study was also influenced by the UK Environment Agency (the government agency responsible for river systems) which approached the water utility, Severn Trent Water Ltd (STWL), with plans to build flood defence barriers along the banks of the River Severn in the town.

Shrewsbury has a history of flooding with fourteen serious flood events affecting properties occurring between 1990 and 2000. The flows in the River Severn are swollen by heavy rainfall in the river’s large upstream catchment in the Welsh mountains before reaching Shrewsbury, the first major urban area along its route. More serious flooding took place in the autumn of 2000 and this led to Government agreement to substantial flood defence works.

Bangkok benefits from Wallingford Software´s flood forecasting system

From mid-September to the end of October each year Bangkok residents and businesses fear the rising levels of the Lower Chao Praya River. Unlike previous years however, in 2003 the quality of information available about the behavior of the Lower Chao Praya River has improved considerably. This follows the implementation of the Hydrodynamic Flow Measurement Project and the application of the InfoWorks RS and FloodWorks, the river system hydraulic modeling and flood forecasting system from Wallingford Software.

InfoWorks helps reduce cost of water supply in Jordan

The Water Authority of Jordan is using InfoWorks WS, the water supply and distribution software from Wallingford Software, to undertake analysis of the country’s existing water infrastructure as part of a major redevelopment of the nation’s water supply system, in particular in Zarqa.

Three river case studies demonstrate the importance of Sediment Modeling

At this year’s Wallingford Software International User Conference, Roger Bettess of HR Wallingford illustrated the value of Sediment Modeling by reference to three very different case studies.

Renewing Belgrade’s Water Infrastructure

After the trauma of the 1990s, new foreign and national investments in Belgrade’s water infrastructure is enabling the city to benefit from the latest advances in water supply technology…

Modeling Hydraulic Interaction between Rivers and Sewers in Flanders, Belgium – Past and Future approaches

Around the world there are many instances of hydraulic interaction between rivers and sewers, and it should come as no surprise that this issue is of particular interest in the lowlands of Flanders, Belgium.

Water Supply on the Croatian Island of Krk

The island of Krk lies close to the northwest coast of Croatia in the Adriatic Sea, linked by bridge to the mainland. With a population of 17,000 spread out over its 150 square miles (400 km2), it is a busy tourist destination in the summer, swelling the population to 100,000, with predictable impacts on water demand and wastewater infrastructure. Out of season it returns to its native population and its agricultural activities of tending olives, vineyards and cattle.

Devonport City Council

Real time control of the sewage system in St Malo

Saint-Malo is an extremely attractive and popular seaside resort on the north coast of Brittany in France. Covering 1,400 hectares, the local population of 50,000 increases to 120,000 in the tourist season. One of the distinguishing features of this part of the Channel coast is a very high tidal range – 14 meters from low to high, with a potential impact back through the sewer network. Combined together, these factors make the effective operation of the sewer system and effluent quality particularly important.

Leveraging value from previous modeling studies

Most water companies regularly commission studies of different basins within their wastewater network, implement the recommendations, and file the report and the model. But does this mean that valuable data sits in archives rather than being re-used continuously for further engineering analysis and decisions? At Arlington, Texas, the Water Department is creating a trunk model of their wastewater network on a single platform largely by re-using model data from previous studies, thereby creating a dynamic, updated, and powerful tool for the future.

Re-building water supply and collection systems in Sofia, Bulgaria

Understanding the operation of water and wastewater networks is an essential prerequisite to performance optimisation. Like many cities throughout the world, Sofiyska Voda has a large amount of data about its network, but not necessarily in a readily accessible and integrated format. To address this United Utilities/International Water and the international consultancy, Ewan Associates Limited, (comma) has a team of project managers developing a new asset management system.

As part of this project the team has invested in InfoNet, the network information system from Wallingford Software. InfoNet provides a central storage repository that enables utilities to integrate, clean and analyse their network data to provide operations managers, engineers and planners with up to date information and reports on network infrastructure and performance. In this way InfoNet gives users a clear single picture of their networks which can aid informed, swift and cost-effective decision-making for both day-to-day operational management and long term network planning.

Modeling highlights weaknesses in Buenos Aires drainage system

The city of Buenos Aires frequently suffers from serious flooding that damages property, the economy and brings misery to the lives of the city’s 3.5m inhabitants. Over 25 deaths have been recorded since 1985. Funded by the World Bank, a two year study of the Buenos Aires drainage system is helping to identify structural weaknesses in the surface and underground network. Early indications suggest that very major infrastructure investment is required to address these issues satisfactorily.

Sponsored by SUPCE, the government´s emergency protection agency and an offshoot of the Ministry of the Interior, an international joint venture group was formed to undertake a Master Plan for the city’s urban drainage system and the detailed design of the resulting works for the most important catchment (Maldonado). The team comprises Halcrow and Harza, the international component, and two of the most important local consultancies in the country, Ingenieria y Asistencia Tecnica Argentina (IATASA) and Latinoconsult.

AMINAL commissions major new flood forecasting system for the Demer river

Winding though some of the most low-lying terrain in the world, Belgium’s Demer river has suffered from flooding problems for many years. To address this situation AMINAL, the Flemish government department responsible for the environment, commissioned a new flood forecasting system designed to give operational flood forecasters the information they need to provide fast and accurate flood warnings. Covering the key flooding areas of a 2275 km2 basin, including the towns of Aarschot, Hasselt, and Zichem, the new flood forecasting system was recently inaugurated by the Flemish government Minister for the Environment.

Demonstrating the Benefits of All Mains Modelling (doc)

Demonstrating the Benefits of All Mains Modelling


Astech Consultants Dallmeier electronic Eiger Systems Paxton Access Limited Taxware Wallingford Software


Who we are Our experience Our people Positioning Ethics Community Contact Us