Smart sensors enhance operating reliability

As a result of the high population density and the large number of commercial and industrial enterprises, the Ruhr Region’s water consumption and therefore volume of waste water per unit area is about seven times higher than average in the Federal Republic. This poses major challenges for the water management infrastructure and leads, above all, to a large service effort in connection with pumping station maintenance. However, KSB has developed a tool that enables all of the pumps to be monitored from one central location.

For over 100 years, the Ruhrverband and its water management infrastructure have been guaranteeing that the Ruhr River, with its relatively small volume of water, can supply the water needed by the entire region. For this purpose, within the river’s catchment area of 4478 square kilometers, the water management association operates more than 800 water management installations, including eight reservoirs and five impounded lakes. The Ruhrverband provides 63 plants with 125 pumping stations for waste water transfer and treatment.

Prematurely worn bearings or pumps clogged with solids after a storm: faults of this kind could only be identified in the past by means of a local diagnosis by hand or from a general fault alarm. What was needed was a solution that would enable precise diagnoses to be made from a remote location and would render preventive service trips unnecessary.

The Ruhrverband and KSB have been working together as partners for decades. Ideas and suggestions for optimisation coming from the customer enable KSB to continuously adapt its products and services to the actual needs of its customers and to prepare them early on to meet future requirements.

 

In the case presented here, KSB recognised the advantages that would be gained by the Ruhrverband if the service trips could be dispensed with. Also, remote monitoring of all of the pumps can deliver much more precise fault analyses than are possible with standard warning devices. This enables the Ruhrverband’s service engineers to concentrate on their actual maintenance work instead of spending unnecessary time on inspection trips.

 

KSB suggested that their intelligent KSB Guard monitoring tool be deployed for monitoring the pumps. This had already succeeded in proving its usefulness for other customers. For this purpose, KSB gave the Department for Maintenance Management of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (IME) at the Ruhrverband a few KSB Guard systems for a practical trial. The sensor unit and the dedicated gateway can be installed by the customer without any prior knowledge and with little effort - even on pumps from other manufacturers. Equipment set-up, commissioning and subsequent monitoring are carried out with an easy-to-use smartphone app or a PC.

Plant: Pumping stations

Client: Ruhrverband

Used Products: 49 KSB Guard units