Plant Optimisation and Resilience

Delivering Efficient Solutions for Plant Optimisation and Resilience 

When assessing resilience, we often find Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and Water Treatment Plants (WTPs) are designed using conservative design criteria and are operated with outdated processes and practices.   Our experience has shown that these facilities often have unexploited additional capacity and opportunities to improve effluent quality and reduce operating costs.  ByrneLooby has a proven track record in managing every aspect of Water and Wastewater Infrastructure, including evidence-based analysis and research to support decision-making, information systems and maximising efficiencies in existing assets and infrastructure.

 Our experts have worked on projects, optimising existing assets and processes with the following benefits:

• Increasing their capacities and efficiency
• Extending their life by incorporation of new upgrades
• Introducing process engineering programmes and reducing leakage with energy-efficient resilient design
  
  

Asset Optimisation Process 

Our water team critically investigate the facility/plant's design assumptions, input parameters and processes and apply innovative thinking to ensure assets are performing and returning on capital investment

• Objective analysis: Establish the optimisation objectives, which may include reduction in energy costs, chemical costs, labour cost and sludge production, increase in plant capacity, improvement of effluent and biosolids quality.
• Asset Inventory: Evaluate the WWTP/WTP to determine the performance and capacity factors; our water team evaluates the plant performance by reviewing the effluent compliance, effluent sampling, analysis results and operational costs. To support a longer-term view, ByrneLooby identifies the current and 10-year plant design capacity.
• Generate the optimisation concept: Identify and implement operational or process changes to address performance or capacity limiting factors.  This can include small changes such as implementing control systems, improved aeration mixing or selecting high-efficiency motors.
• Sustain: Once the optimisation process and plan have been delivered, we will work with you to sustain improvements in operations, maintenance, and performance. With regular updates, we can provide a thorough understanding of existing and future planned water assets. Through the application of BIM, we can view asset resilience and performance over time.
  
  Plant Optimisation across a Range of Parameters:  
• Retrofitting new technology and integrating with existing infrastructure
• Improved control system
• Improved mixing/aeration
• Improved settlement characteristics
• More efficient use of labour
• More efficient use of power
• Increasing sludge concentration
• Optimising chemical usages by conducting jar tests
• Upgrade of screens
• Provision of storage tanks