A "sweet shop" of Instrumentation - What did I miss at WWEM this year

Every other year those in the Water Industry in the UK gather in one place to talk, present and keep in touch with all things instrumentation in the UK. The place is Telford and the event is WWEM, the Water, Wastewater & Environmental Monitoring Conference & Exhibition.

Of course things have grown over the years and on top of the large variety of instrumentation suppliers who were there to talk about their newest releases and the technology that has been designed to help the water industry there was a very strong programme of conferences and workshops. If fact there were eight of them in total plus a wide variety of technical presentations to. Now not everyone was able to come (where were you?) but in the following few lines I hope to give you a snippet of what you missed.

The Competitions

A long standing competition that has been present at WWEM is the Early Career Researcher Prize that comes from the Sensors for Water Interest Group. The competition starts a few months earlier with a call for posters and this year there were 17 submissions from around the globe. The SWIG Board of Directors select their top three and the competitors are invited to come to WWEM to present their posters and find out who has won and the gala dinner on the evening of the first day as well as picking up a check for ￡1,200 for the winner.

This year's winner was Zoe Goddard of the University of East Anglia who presented the poster on " Optically-Profiling Diffusible Iron Concentrations in Sediment Pore Water" with Kevin Martins of the University of Bath and Elena Koutsoumpeli of the University of York runners up.

This of course isn't it for the competition side of things as there was also the Instrumentation Apprentice Competition as well. The competition which was originally started in 2014 by the Water Industry Process Automation & Control Group (WIPAC) and was run this year by the world famous consultancy the WRC and the SWIG Group. The competition that was kindly sponsored by ABB, ATI, Partech, SEFS & Siemens see Instrumentation Apprentices from the Water Companies battle it out in three rounds with a round investigating instrumentation amongst the shows suppliers, a practical competition run by the sponsors and a quick fire quiz round hosted by Andy Godley of the WRC, Each of the Apprentices are invited to the gala dinner where the winner is announced.

The five teams this year that competed were from Anglian Water, Severn Trent & United Utilities (two from both Anglian & Severn Trent) and Anglian Water successfully defended their title from 2014 with Fred Riseborough and Dale Reece winning the day

The Conferences

This year's WWEM featured a staggering amount of conferences and I certainly had my fill of them as I ran from room to room either hosting a conference or presenting at one. This is of course in addition to the workshops that WWEM runs in the hall (featuring over 80 presentations). I think my quick head count of conferences had over 200 presentations. Quite something for something that is considered a "trade show" by some.

This year was of course something special with the International Water Association hosting their 3rd Conference in the "New Developments in IT & Water" series. This is something of a misnomer as really it was about bringing the Smart Water Industry into a "business of usual" phase in the Water Industry. This was neatly highlighted when the first of the keynote speakers said "this is what the key highly successful service industries in the world are doing to provide customer service....how about you. Bas Boorsma of Cisco Systems sent the scene for what promised to be a fascinating first day with the two sessions being chaired by Elliot Gill of CH2M Hill and Jim Southworth. The sessions covered The Value of Smart Water, modelling and control in both Potable & Wastewater as well as data analytics, decision support systems and the Internet of Things.

The second day, which was hosted by Richard Crowder of CH2M Hill and Oliver Grievson of Water Industry Process Automation & Control covered event more when we heard about the risks and perils that the industry faces from Cyber Security (and the ease of which it is possible to hack a SCADA System) and the Shinning Stars programme along with the educational work that is being done with companies such as Anglian Water to educate the work force. The talks then went on to talk about communications protocols where what promised to be a contentious session actually ended up with all of the speakers discussing the newest of releases from the Water Industry Telemetry Standards Association (WITS) which is WITS-IOT.

In the other room presentations were given about the management of data within the Water Industry and Sensing & Analysis in Wastewater.

The IWA Conference finished with two workshops. The first hosted by the IWA concentrating on the Smart Wastewater Industry and was hosted by Oliver Grievson and the second by the SWAN Forum and was hosted by Jim Southworth. In the IWA session a panel of experts and those gathered how to make the Smart Wastewater Industry a thing that is quite simply "Business of Usual." Normal discussions of what Smart means to the water industry ensued and the atmosphere was very much an open discussion. The lack of understanding of what Smart is and what it can do for the water industry was seen as a major factor of the lack of adoption along with the lack of engagement and saying what the benefits are.

This was fed from a presentation given in the CIWEM conference the day before. The subject of the conference was "The Water & Environment Industries of 2050" where Oliver Grievson gave his view of what the Water Industry would look like. The vision was very much using the technology of today to deliver what we want today but of course in reality, things such as zero pollutions, low leakage, low per capita consumption and using technology to deliver this. The adage of "You can't manage what you don't measure comes to mind.

This was an adage that was also used in the Water Industry Process Automation & Control (WIPAC) Flow Forum which was kindly sponsored by RS Hydro this year. The conference was being chaired by Oliver Grievson and covered three key areas of flow within the Water Industry including

• Installation, Operation & Management of Flow Measurement Installations
• The Value of Flow Measurement
• Area Velocity Flow Measurement in Wastewater

Presentations by Simon Richardson of SEFS & John Curtis of Morrison Utility Services highlighted the care that needs to be taken in not just installing but operating flow measurement structures and a fantastic presentation by Tony Wood of CSA Group highlighted the systems that need to be in place to manage flow measurement to stop things from going wrong.

The second session of the Flow Forum saw Alan Hunt, Lorenzo Pompa and Danny Ronson of ABB, Anglian Water & Siemens respectively present on the use that we can put flow measurement to. Lorenzo in particular, having had experience in the field gave an operational point of view in to the difficulties of managing wastewater networks and the benefits that flow measurement can give.

The last session featured presentations and an open discussion on the use of area velocity flow measurement and in particular the presentations by Laurent Soliec (Nivus), Mark Davis (Flowline) & Rob Stevens (RS Hydro) showing the reliability of the technique and what can be done to verify that it is as accurate as other flow measurement techniques.

On top of all of these conferences were others including:

• Sensors for Water Interest Group Conference on the resilence of sensor networks and the use of sensors in challenging applications.
• SCI Laboratory Conference
• BMSS Conference
• British Water Conference
• Pump Centre Conference

The exhibition

When I first arrived at WWEM this year I was privileged to have a quick look around when it was empty. It was going to stay that way for long and it didn't. The suppliers who are the "heart & soul" of the conference soon moved in and populated the stands turning them into gems of information for visitors to glean what is happening in the industry

The exhibition itself is a chance for people to catch up with the latest innovations and increasingly the suppliers are using WWEM to launch the newest of products or announcing the newest certification for products. For example Vega Controls this year launched their WL S 61 which is a light version of their WL61 radar level that received MCERTS Product certification at WWEM this year, They were not the only company to present new and/or innovative products, ABB had their newest Laser Level meter on show, the LLT 100, Pulsar Process Measurement had both their Microflow Flow meter and their Ultimate Controller on display, Nivus had their newest of area velocity flow measurement technology and Envitech had the newest version of their ammonia monitor the PBS 3 which has significantly developed from what I was used to using when commissioning ammonia instruments.

There was of course many many measurement technologies their this year and at the end of it the possibilities of applications was whizzing around in my mind as to the possibilities of what needs to be measured and where for the Global Water Industry to build upon so that we can work to what most people would deem to an intelligent way of working or of course "Smart".