Case Study | Process Solutions

Digital Twin Technology Improves Maintenance

IDE Americas uses digital twin technology to help desalination plants improve maintenance of their filtering membranes

Frits van Rooiji is OT Manager for IDE Americas, part of IDE Technologies, which is a world leader in water treatment solutions and has had a long-standing relationship with Rockwell Automation. IDE develops, engineers, builds and operates advanced water treatment and desalination plants for municipal and industrial customers.

Desalination is an important technology to meet the world’s fresh water needs. Most of the planet’s water is salted with an average salinity rate too high for drinking, industry or agriculture. Seawater desalination removes salt and dissolved solids and is an alternative and reliable water source to deliver water sustainability.

The Western Hemisphere’s largest desalination plant is in Carlsbad, California run by the San Diego County Water Authority. The award-winning plant uses IDE and Rockwell Automation technologies to help produce 54 million gallons of clean water a day for about 300,000 people.

“We take the water from the ocean, separate it from the salt, filter it, and add the right minerals to produce excellent drinking water,” Frits explains.

The plant uses Reverse Osmosis (RO) Membrane desalination to remove salt and other impurities by transferring water through a series of semi-permeable membranes. But a major challenge for the plant and the desalination industry as a whole is biofouling, which is the fouling of equipment underwater. That includes membrane fouling, which impedes permeability.

“It’s mainly due to seasonal blooms,” Frits says. “It shortens the lifespan of membranes and can get quite expensive. It can take plants out for a long period of time, which means you can’t produce.”

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Digital Twin Technology Improves Maintenance

IDE Americas uses digital twin technology to help desalination plants improve maintenance of their filtering membranes

Frits van Rooiji

OT Manager, IDE Americas

Digital Twin and Artificial Intelligence Technology Leads to Cost Savings

That’s why IDE turned to digital twin technology as an operations and maintenance solution to preserve and increase membrane lifespans.

“Using 5 years of Carlsbad plant data, we modeled the desalination of the membranes and what was happening related to biofouling. Based on that, we can virtually test various maintenance policies to see what works best for system reliability and cost,” Frits explains. “This has resulted in a projected savings for the desalination plant of up to $1.5 million dollars over the next 5 years.”

Autopiloted Control Systems

Process control at the Carlsbad and other large desalination plants that IDE supports is based on common pressure centers, such as high-pressure pumps and energy recovery.

These systems are complex, and to manage that complexity, IDE built an autopilot system, in which the operator says, ‘These are the parameters I need. This is how much I want to produce. And these are the recoveries that we want to reach for the different phases.’

“Then the system takes care of it,” Frits explains. “The autopilot system frees the operator to focus on quality control instead of hands-on manual operations.” For many projects, IDE uses the PlantPAx Distributed Control System due to its ability to handle process complexity.

Learn more about other IDE and Rockwell Automation projects.

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