Authentic Water Dam Infrastructure Maintenance with Australia’s Finest Technological Solution
Use Case / Water Dam
About
The Water Utility Industry is challenged by many asset-oriented conundrums every day, and if the industrial practitioners in this industry are not equipped with battle-tested smart technologies, they are missing out on resolving many issues. Successfully enabling the best solution for these players cannot be emphasised enough because they are supplying the lifeblood of our lives- water. Water is regarded as the most vital resource for all living beings; therefore, humans have come up with various ways to build water repositories with strong dams to store water in large quantities in the form of reservoirs or lakes. Main Water Infrastructure Systems have 4 main phases: Water Catchment, Water Treatment, Water Distribution and Water Reticulation. Water Dams are a part of the initial stage of the vast Water Infrastructure System (Water Catchment). The Water Catchment refers to the act of accumulating the runoff water points and rainwater of a certain expanse and collecting them into a catchment area, technically referred to as a basin. Water Dams are used to confine the collected water in the basin; therefore, it is one of the most critical capital assets of the Water Infrastructure System.
Dams are colossal architectures that accumulate water by restricting water flows to store water for many quintessential purposes like to suppress floods and continuously supply water to suffice industrial, commercial and residential needs and wants. Dams are now considered as a tourist attraction too; they play a main role in Australia to promote local tourism. There are over 820 dams in major waterways in Australia, which amounts to 91,000 Gigalitres (GL), and 500 of these dams are ‘Large Dams’.
Based on the requirement, dams can fall under many types: cofferdams, debris dams, detention dams, diversion dams, and storage dams. In terms of designs, dams can be either arch dams, buttress dams, earth dams, gravity dams, rockfill dams, steel dams or timber dams. However, a Dam Infrastructure is comprised of several main components:
- The Dam- Water-retaining structure
- Spillway- Release excess water downstream
- Sluice Way- Clears out the accumulated silt in the upstream
- Conduits- Water-conveying structures
- The Crest- The transportation way over the Dam
- Parapet Wall- Protection walls on either side of the crest
- Gallery- A tunnel-like horizontal structure assigned for the operators and maintainers of the Dam Infrastructure
- Heel- The lower corner of the dam that faces the upstream
- Toe- The lower corner of the dam that faces the downstreamon
The Water Dam Infrastructure Maintenance of Australia
The warm climatic changes and the upsurging level of urbanisation in Australia have put the water utility service enabling bodies and authorities in a powder keg situation because they have to ensure that all target water consumers are supplied with enough quantities of water regardless of the climatic, economic, geographical or any other impactful changes. This is where the importance of Water Dam Infrastructure Maintenance is of most importance. Storing water can serve several purposes in Australia, such as:
- Controlling Floods
- Domestic Purposes
- Harvesting Hydropower
- Industrial Use
- Irrigation Purposes
- Meeting Agricultural Demands to Supply Food
- Recreating Activities (boating, fishing and sailing)
However, storing water in large quantities makes private, and public water utility service enablers and government agencies responsible for water supply bear many burdens in securing and maintaining reservoirs and dam infrastructure optimally. They are prone to be impacted by several influences, like expensive operational and environmental consequences, maintenance costs, security of water supplies, climatic risks, and many more. This is why new-age water control boards, city councils, government bureaus and departments understand that Water Dam Infrastructures must be maintained via new-fangled technological solutions. The water storage units that spur hydro facilities in Australia are colossal. The following table illustrates the recent (1st of May 2021) water levels compared to the fullest water capacities of reservoirs in the 8 states of Australia.
| State/ Territory | Current Volume (ML) | Accessible Capacity (ML) | Current % Full | Date Reported (Most Recent) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Australian Capital Territory
|
158,420
|
158,430
|
100.0
|
2021-06-01
|
|
New South Wales
|
11,519,246
|
21,009,331
|
54.8
|
2021-06-01
|
|
Northern Territory
|
263,084
|
289,317
|
90.9 |
2021-06-01 |
|
Queensland
|
6,044,228
|
10,345,694
|
58.4
|
2021-06-01
|
|
South Australia
|
2,010,879
|
2,252,391
|
89.3
|
2021-06-01
|
|
Tasmania |
11,965,865
|
22,040,990
|
54.3
|
2021-06-01
|
|
Victoria |
7,051,023
|
12,653,053
|
55.7
|
2021-06-01
|
|
Western Australia
|
8,543,173
|
11,487,036
|
74.4
|
2021-06-01
|
Since the Water Dam Infrastructure Networks in Australia link various water bodies and serve diversified biological and aquatic ecosystems, Australia has imposed safety regulations for the administrative, managerial and operational parties to execute effective dam safety measurements to avoid the risks of dam failure and hindrance to life and property. The most common regulations imposed by these legal authorities are:
- Communicating Standing Operating Procedures
- Conducting Dam Safety Training Programs
- Creation of Maintenance Manuals
- Creation of Operation Manuals
- Documents (including drawings) to prove the quality and assurance of dam infrastructural designs and constructions
- Engineer Dam Inspections
- Improving the integrity of the dam
- Scheduling Periodic Reviews on Dam Safety
- The urgency of reporting dam failures and executions of emergency protocols and more.
Problem
Dam Asset Managers and Leadership teams come across a range of limitations when operating to manage and maintain dam infrastructures, for example:
- Failing to hold back floods
- Inability to account for water losses due to evaporation
- Inability to test the resilience of dam infrastructures
- Failure to understand the physical impacts which put river valleys in jeopardy
- Neglecting Laws and Regulations in constructing, expanding or maintaining a dam
- Overbugetting or undercutting dam infrastructure investment profiles
- Social influences in disrupting river ecosystems
- The incapability of measuring the downstream effects of dams, such as contamination of water, fisheries losses, reduction of fertility in farmlands and forests, the spread of waterborne diseases etc.
This is why the need for a proper technological solution to maintain water Dam Infrastructure is high in demand in Australia. Many limitations, including the few examples mentioned above, show the criticality and the severity in monitoring dam infrastructures precisely and making the most suitable decisions because a simple misreading can result in detrimental and sometimes fatal outcomes. Some of the main demands of Water Dam Infrastructure manoeuvring entities are: a solution that:
- Does not leave them astray during the uncertain conditions
- Illustrates current and predicted climatic changes
- Showcases real-time and predicted dam water levels
- Indicates water spillway pressures and lever controls based on specific overflow events
- Generates Analytical Reports that give insightful information to schedule future discharges
- Allows them to read Dam Statistics via an interactive and scalable digital model
Solution
Tigernix has helped our client city council to overcome all the problems in managing and resourcefully maintaining the Dam Infrastructure of their Water Infrastructure Systems (including the problems mentioned above) via a single consolidated solution. Tigernix Water Asset Solution is comprised of Tigernix Catchment Solution which is a new-age software module. This software allowed our Australian client city council to manage their dam infrastructure using a set of newly-fangled tools and modules that we have tailored just for them. One of the most important facts about Tigernix Catchment Solution is that it does not facilitate a single Dam Infrastructure; the user can manipulate this solution to gain access to manage, control and maintain several water dam infrastructures in a single console. With Tigernix Catchment Solution, the asset manager and leadership teams of the client city council were able to:
- Capitalise Dam Infrastructure Data to evade expensive and dangerous failures
- Curate maintenance schedules based on asset criticality and weather conditions
- Exploit dam asset data privatisation and security protocols
- Gain enough information to chip off dispensable asset spending
- Place undying trust on dam assets
- React to impending risks beforehand and avoid elongated dam system downtimes
- Upheave the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) standards of dam infrastructures
- Use trigger systems to make sure that they are not breaking any laws or regulations and many other benefits.
Our solution has served the asset managers and leadership teams in charge of the Water Dam Infrastructure of the client organisation in three main aspects.
1. Gaining Real-time Water Dam Information
Tigernix Catchment Solution allows asset managers to gain end-to-end real-time parametric readings of Dam Infrastructures. The user of this solution can employ an interactive GUI with a 2D or 3D digital representation of the Water Dam Infrastructure to read the real-time rainfall rates, inflow and outflow rates, evaporation levels, groundwater levels, soil moisture, patterns of river flow currents, precipitations and carbon fluxes that impact the health of the Water Dam Infrastructure. The real-time data will be stored in data repositories for later predictive analytical purposes with the best data security and backup services too. Our Catchment Solution was tailored for the client establishment to view other real-time readings too, such as:
- chlorine residual
- dammed water levels
- discharges in the spillway and sluice gate via interactive charts
- gate schedules
- Ph levels of water
- supply demands
- turbidity and more.
2. Predicting Parametric Behaviours
Secondly, Tigernix Catchment Solution facilitated Water Dam Infrastructure custodians by helping them to predict different aspects that influence the health of their dam-related assets and service levels of water; it denotes predicted parameters of asset confidences and reliability, risk levels and their date of incidence, inflow during future risk occurrence, gauged rates of the river heights or rainfall for the next 7 days, basin evaporation and soil moisture levels, river flow and groundwater distribution rates and many other readings using AI-empowered machine learning models and protocols.
- Dam Infrastructure Criticality Models
- Dam Infrastructure Decay Profiles
- Dam Infrastructure Reliability Metrics
- Dam Infrastructure Service Reliability Models
- Visualised Parametric Dashboards
3. Enabling end-to-end Dam Infrastructure Visibilities via Simulation Technologies
One of the most important capabilities of Tigernix Catchment Solution is its compatibility with simulation technology. It inherits a fully-equipped Simulated Dam Operational Model. It allows its users to manipulate parameters to predict the level of risk, level of reliability on dam infrastructure and the risk occurrence dates, respectively. This solution incorporates parameter scales which the user can simply tweak or drag sideways to feed data into a simulated model of your Dam Infrastructure and envision the aftereffects of such scenarios with scientifically proven insights.
- 2D Digital Representation of Dam Infrastructure
- 3D Digital Representation of Dam Infrastructure
- Simulated Model Data Feeding Panel
- Interactive and Rotatable Digital Representations
- GIS (Geographic Information System) Layers to highlight substandard performance or noteworthy occurrences in dam infrastructure
Summary
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