Improving productivity with digital twins in industrial water

As industrial producers experience the use of high-fidelity process models in water, a new world of optimisation opportunities open up from daily actions through to production planning and even evaluation of capital projects, Neil Davidson from Ecolab tells OGN

NALCO Water, an Ecolab company, has been serving industrial producers for nearly a century. At the heart of that service is deep domain expertise in how water impacts industrial production plant.

"From our beginnings, we have pioneered innovative technologies in water chemistry and automation to help industry achieve greater environmental compliance, reliability, and efficiency," Neil Davidson, Business Development Lead, Climate Intelligence & Partner Solutions, Ecolab, tells OGN energy magazine.

In the past 30 years Nalco Water has deployed its industry-leading 3DTrasar technology 40,000 installed water monitoring systems producing 90 billion data points annually.

More recently we have brought digital solutions to industry to quantify individual plant equipment performance that may have previously been overlooked, under-estimated or not fully understood.

With such insights, together with our industrial producer customers we are empowered to take informed, quantified actions to address performance gaps in reliability and efficiency at the individual plant equipment level based on our perspective through water.

However, to take the performance of industrial water to the next level for producers to achieve their ambitious sustainability goals, a novel approach is required.

An approach that takes a holistic view of water and production so that decisions on sustainability outcomes are informed based on production needs. Productivity must improve along with sustainability.

Water's role is complicated and its relationship to production processes is often not understood sufficiently to allow optimisation.

What we have seen repeatedly is that the interrelationship between water and production is invariably multifaceted and very dynamic with numerous variables capable of working in conjunction or opposition with each other.