September 20, 2024
Keystone Clearwater’s WaterForce® Autonomous Temporary Water Line vs Operator Controlled Line
Keystone Clearwater Solutions automates water transfer systems at scale via our award-winning platform, WaterForce®.
Recently, an energy operator in Southwestern Pa. contracted Keystone Clearwater Solutions to operate a large, approximately 20-mile temporary water line to supply produced water to their water-dependent well completions site. This mission-critical temporary water line consisted of a main trunk line with multiple branches, source lines, and booster pump stations.
Typically, water transfer service companies lease off-the-shelf automation control systems driven by a pump control panel. These control panels are then supplied with input data from attached digital pressure sensors and/or flow meters. Control is either rendered to a remote operator via wireless connectivity, or pre-configured to have the control panel run at certain governing setpoints (usually pressure-PSI) based on the data input received.
Going to the next level of water transfer technology
Keystone Clearwater Solutions’ proprietary WaterForce automation platform goes quite a bit further. With environmental safety as a core value, the WaterForce team has invested in advanced methods and means to further mitigate risks associated with standard pump control operation.
Here’s how:
- Each booster pump station is armed with local logic control that is now rolled up into a real-time cloud governance system, including:
- Flow-rate expected vs. observed safety interlocks
- Pressure expected vs. observed safety interlocks
- Guided startups and shutdowns, a push-button automated sequence engineered-to-suit
Essentially, we’re not leaving the control of a booster pump system up to the sole discretion of an operator, but rather implementing automated operation based on real-time engineering calculations about the health of the hydraulic system as a whole. Where this becomes important is the operator error factor. Different shifts of operators may have different skill levels, different understandings of the system, or simply react unilaterally despite the standard operating procedures that have been put into place. Human operators quickly become the independent variable in an otherwise perfectly engineered hydraulic water transfer system.
This is a real differentiating factor in that the WaterForce automation system isn’t limited to treating each Booster Pump as an insular mechanism, whereby safety features and operational interlocks are only occurring at each of the individual booster sites. Instead, the WaterForce system is engaged in holistic system governance through real-time cloud-aggregated data computation. This allows for system-wide safety features including leak detection techniques and automatic “graceful” system startup/shutdowns to be viable.
This isn’t anything new. Permanent midstream pipeline systems have had these advanced safety systems in place for decades, but it’s never yet been available to temporary water line transfer systems. That is where WaterForce automation technology’s offerings are way ahead of contemporary water transfer automation offerings.
- Each Booster Pump Station is equipped with electrically actuated flow control valves, allowing WaterForce to more safely control the flow and pressure throughout the system, especially at vulnerable connection points where hoses and bolted pump connections are concerned. Our programmable logic controllers (PLC) that are situated at each pump station control valve sequencing, allowing for instantaneous isolation or backup pump failover sequences, automatically.
- Each Booster Pump Station is equipped with liquid level control within the secondary containment, essentially detecting any uncontrolled releases around vulnerable connection points. This form of level detection has been instrumental in environmental release early detection and capture, automatically alerting and shutting down pumps in these events.
- Each Booster Pump Station is equipped with PLC-based PID Loop Speed Control referenced to pressure. This allows for true autonomous control and optimal pump performance.
In this recent TWL O&M project, Keystone Clearwater Solutions was given the opportunity to implement WaterForce when traditionally the producer had a remote operations center where human operators would sit shifts to remotely control the temporary water line booster pump system. WaterForce has vibration sensors installed on these diesel-engine centrifugal pumps, and historically, would receive semi-regular notifications of high vibration or mechanical anomaly alerts, corresponding to extreme cavitation events and bearing/shaft/seal mechanical issues. These would then typically convert to unplanned downtime events where the pump would be swapped due to failure.
Once WaterForce’s automated temporary water line system was implemented, effectively transferring primary control from human operators to the automated system, the vibration alerts diminished and subsequently, so did the unplanned downtime swap events.
Analysis of the vibration data confirmed that overall peak RMS velocity and peak acceleration vibrations levels had subsided in a number of critical areas (see data samples in charts below). Analysis of pressure data validated our vibration reduction findings, corresponding to more regulated and normalized pressure gradients on inlet pressure trends.
These data analyses confirmed that with our WaterForce automated control of the booster pump system, we will realize prolonged equipment health, reduced downtime and cost, and optimized system performance.
Comparative volatility in duration and amplitude of RMS velocity (vibration) as measured by sensors mounted on pump inlet and discharge hou sings, as well as motor-shaft housing
For more information about this case history and Keystone Clearwater Solutions’ recent advancements in temporary water line pump automation technology, please contact:
Edward Strauser, PMP
Director of Automation
estrauser@keystoneclear.net
