InfoWorks enjoys dynamic success in Australia
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InfoWorks enjoys dynamic success in Australia Wallingford Software’s InfoWorks solutions are enjoying major successes in Australia. SA Water in Adelaide is about to undertake a major hydraulic modeling exercise using InfoWorks CS to determine which parts of its wastewater collection networks require upgrades or rehabilitation. Meanwhile Water Corporation in Perth is about to use the same software solution for all its urban drainage projects and has also purchased InfoWorks RS for a major rural river project.
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South Australian Water Corporation (SA Water) is wholly owned by the Government of South Australia, and delivers water and wastewater services to almost 1.4 million people across the state.
With an annual turnover of around AUD$550 million ($418 million) per annum, assets of more than AUD$6 billion ($4.6 billion) and over 1100 staff, it is a key player in both the South Australian economy and environment.
SA Water is currently setting up a sophisticated dynamic hydraulic modeling project that will eventually cover all State-wide wastewater networks.
The project aims to establish a detailed hydraulic performance assessment for the wastewater networks, which in total consist of around 5,680 miles (10,000km) of gravity mains and 550 pumping stations.
At this stage two pilot areas are under investigation. Both consist of a mix of gravity and pumped networks (equating to collection system models containing 2500 and 1500 nodes respectively), with around 40 pumping stations.
After the initial calibrations have been undertaken, the models will be extended to simulate the impact of future loads resulting from residential and commercial development.
The planners in SA Water also envisage building future models up to the extent of major metropolitan catchments. These could comprise of up to 150,000 pipes without undertaking pruning. The pruning process allows non-essential elements of the model to be removed to enable it to run more efficiently and effectively. InfoWorks CS provides aautomatic compensation for ´lost´ storage when pruning and merging network data.
SA Water is also considering integration with their SCADA systems and potentially using InfoWorks CS as an operational tool in the future.
Michael Leidinger, Project Manager for the modeling implementation, says: ‘We undertook an extensive internal evaluation process, which compared three standard packages. The results of this exercise led to InfoWorks CS being accepted as our preferred choice.’
He added: ‘We found the software solution’s database management and version control features extremely attractive, as well as its support for enterprise databases (SQL Server / Oracle) and its multi-user capabilities. Model building tools such as the pruning feature and the ability to automatically infer missing data and set data source tags were also seen as most useful.’
Water Corporation is one of Australia’s largest and most successful water service providers, bringing water and wastewater services to the fast-growing city of Perth, with a population of almost 1.4 million people, on the continent’s west coast, as well as hundreds of smaller towns spread across 2.5 million square kilometers.
The Corporation had been using Wallingford Software’s HydroWorks software solution for stormwater drainage modeling after an extensive evaluation of software in 1998 identified HydroWorks as the most suitable solution available. Recently, however, the Corporation has moved to InfoWorks CS to enable performance evaluation against the requirements of its operating licence and to identify and schedule capital works.
Planning engineer Kanex Kangaratnam said: ‘New features introduced in InfoWorks such as culvert hydraulics, GIS integration, version control and so on, as well as its compatibility with HydroWorks, drew the attention of the Corporation and created an interest in the product.
‘The willingness of Wallingford Software to incorporate additional features such as the Villemonte equation for submerged weirs, further enhancement of culvert hydraulics and other features at the request of the Corporation, coupled with our need for more licences to accelerate the planning program, resulted in the acquisition of InfoWorks CS licences.’
As the Corporation is also involved in modeling rural drains and rivers in Western Australia, it has also acquired InfoWorks RS after assessing its suitability for its use within the organization. www.wallingfordsoftware.com
