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Optimisation of a water company’s waste pumping asset base with a focus on energy reduction
This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonWater companies use a significant quantity of electricity for the operation of their clean and wastewater assets. Rising energy prices have led to higher energy bills within the water companies, which has increased operating costs. Thus, improvements in demand side energy management are needed to increase efficiency and reduce costs, which forms the premise for this research project.
Thames Water Utilities Ltd has identified that improvements in demand side energy management is required and is currently researching various methods to reduce energy consumption. One initiative included the upgrade of a variety of site telemetry assets. By deploying these new telemetry assets, Thames Water Utilities Ltd are more able to liberate the asset data and as such, be able to make informed decisions on how better to control and optimise the target sites, which is where this research project has seen further opportunities. This enhanced telemetry and SCADA infrastructure will enable successful research to further develop an intelligent integrated system that tackles pump scheduling and process control with the emphasis on energy management.
The use of modern techniques, such as artificial intelligence, to optimise the network operation is gradually gaining traction. The balance between implementing new technology (with the benefits it may bring) and reluctance to change from the incumbent operating model will always provide challenges in the technology adoption agenda.
The main work of this research project included the physical surveying of a wastewater hydraulic catchment, inclusive of all wet well dimensions, lidar overlays, and pump electrical power characteristics. These survey results where then able to be programmed by the research into the company’s' hydraulic model to enable a higher degree of accuracy in the modelling, as well as enabling electrical power as a measurable output. From here, the model was then able to be optimised, focussing on electrical energy as an output variable for reduction.
The research concluded that electrical energy consumption over time can be reduced using the aforementioned strategies and as such recommends further work to move from the model environment to physical architecture. It does so with the key message that risk tolerances on water levels must be pre-agreed with hydraulic specialists prior to deployment
Fast Algorithms and Efficient Statistics: N-point Correlation Functions
We present here a new algorithm for the fast computation of N-point
correlation functions in large astronomical data sets. The algorithm is based
on kdtrees which are decorated with cached sufficient statistics thus allowing
for orders of magnitude speed-ups over the naive non-tree-based implementation
of correlation functions. We further discuss the use of controlled
approximations within the computation which allows for further acceleration. In
summary, our algorithm now makes it possible to compute exact, all-pairs,
measurements of the 2, 3 and 4-point correlation functions for cosmological
data sets like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; York et al. 2000) and the
next generation of Cosmic Microwave Background experiments (see Szapudi et al.
2000).Comment: To appear in Proceedings of MPA/MPE/ESO Conference "Mining the Sky",
July 31 - August 4, 2000, Garching, German
Microfluidic Chip for High Efficiency Microinjection of Caenorhabditis elegans
The terrestrial nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, is an invaluable model organism for the study of molecular and cellular processes due to their small size, rapid generation time, easy cultivation, and invariant cell number. Additionally, 40% of genes known to be associated with human disease have clear orthologs in the C. elegans genome. In C. elegans genetics research, microinjection of genetic material into the worms is critical. Although an established technique, manual microinjection is tedious, low-throughput, and requires an expert researcher. This thesis details a novel microfluidic device designed to perform high-throughput microinjection. This two-layer, PDMS-based chip integrates microfluidic elements to control worm sorting, reduction of immobilization time and stress, and novel on-chip microinjection using only a positive pressure source. Our project aim is to increase microinjection efficiency, consistency, and accessibility to researchers of all experience levels in order to advance genetics research and genetic engineering technology in C. elegans. Preliminary results are promising, as our on-chip microinjection device has been able to successfully inject dye into C. elegans animals
Data Mining the SDSS SkyServer Database
An earlier paper (Szalay et. al. "Designing and Mining MultiTerabyte
Astronomy Archives: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey," ACM SIGMOD 2000) described
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's (SDSS) data management needs by defining twenty
database queries and twelve data visualization tasks that a good data
management system should support. We built a database and interfaces to support
both the query load and also a website for ad-hoc access. This paper reports on
the database design, describes the data loading pipeline, and reports on the
query implementation and performance. The queries typically translated to a
single SQL statement. Most queries run in less than 20 seconds, allowing
scientists to interactively explore the database. This paper is an in-depth
tour of those queries. Readers should first have studied the companion overview
paper Szalay et. al. "The SDSS SkyServer, Public Access to the Sloan Digital
Sky Server Data" ACM SIGMOND 2002.Comment: 40 pages, Original source is at
http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/Papers/MSR_TR_O2_01_20_queries.do
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