American Water, the nation’s largest publicly traded water and wastewater utility company, and IOSight, Ltd., announced a partnership to design and implement a smart water management system in American Water New Jersey water and wastewater treatment facilities. The two companies mutually won an $800,000 award from the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, which will partially fund the $2 million, 2-year project. 

The proposed SWMS will develop and integrate a comprehensive data management, data analysis and reporting system covering the major processes performed in the plant, which will let local plant operators leverage the system reports and analytics to create an improved, streamlined and more efficient operation. While focusing on a single location, the lessons learned from the proposed project, will be useful to the larger North American and global water utility sector. Using SWMS will demonstrate the potential benefits of smart data management and reporting, to an operating water treatment facility, emphasizing increased efficiency and cost savings.

“Increasing operational efficiency is a major priority at American Water and for many utilities around the world," says Dr. Mark LeChevallier, director of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship at American Water. “While across our industry treatment plants are equipped with a multitude of sensors and collect a lot of data, most utilities do not make efficient use of this. Thus, it can be said that we are data rich, but information poor. The innovation will allow us to better harness the data that we do collect and enable us to make actionable decisions to improve operations and save money, which ultimately benefits our customers.” 

The program will center on the installation of SWMS at southwestern N.J. operations. The system is centered on the Delaware River Regional Water Treatment Plant (DRRWTP) in Delran, N.J., but also includes 63 groundwater wells. On average, the system delivers 42 mgd to residential customers in 11 different pressure zones and 23 wholesale customers. The majority of system delivery is supplied by the DRRWTP (60 percent). Because of the minimal treatment requirements of groundwater systems relative to Delaware River water, the cost of treatment for the DRRWTP drives the operational efficiency of the system as a whole.

The DRRWTP treatment train includes preozonation, coagulation with ferric chloride, clarification through SuperPulsator sludge blanket clarifiers, filtration through granular activated carbon filters, and final disinfection with chlorine.

The second site will be the Jefferson Peaks wastewater treatment plant located in Oak Ridge, N.J. The plant, while relatively small (125,000 gpd capacity), is complex, using membrane bioreactors and disinfection with ultraviolet light. The plant is operated at low dissolved oxygen conditions to enable nitrification and denitrification. Thus, process control is critical for the plant to maintain its stringent discharge limitations.

Following the detailed development of the SWMS at the two plants (Delran and Jefferson Peaks), two additional American Water plants will be identified for compatibility tests to determine how quickly iWt and iWWt systems can be integrated into new plants.

This is the second BIRD Foundation award for American Water and the first for IOSight, Ltd.

About BIRD Foundation
The Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation works to encourage cooperation between Israeli and American companies in the various areas of technology and provides free assistance in locating strategic partners from both countries for developing joint products.

The BIRD Foundation supports projects without receiving any rights in the participating companies or in the project itself. The financial assistance is repaid as royalties from sales. The Foundation provides support of up to 50 percent of a project’s budget, beginning with R&D and ending with the initial stages of sales and marketing. The Foundation shares the risk and does not demand that the investment be repaid if the project fails to reach the sales stage.

About IOSight Ltd.
IOSight is an innovator and a market leader in the field of infrastructure facility management. IOSight provides cost effective BI/data management and reporting solutions for medium-to-large water and energy infrastructure facilities reducing costs, improving efficiency, increasing productivity, saving energy and delivering regulatory compliance.

Active in the water and energy sectors since end of 2007, IOSight has more than 60 successful installations in the world’s largest desalination plants, water utilities, wastewater treatment plants and power production facilities.

About American Water
Founded in 1886, American Water is the largest and most geographically diverse publicly traded U.S. water and wastewater utility company. With headquarters in Voorhees, N.J., the company employs 6,400 dedicated professionals who provide regulated and market-based drinking water, wastewater and other related services to an estimated 15 million people in 47 states and Ontario, Canada. More information can be found at www.amwater.com.