Intime Condition Monitoring for Water Utilities

Client Background

The client is the largest bulk water utility in Africa and one of the largest globally, providing bulk potable water to more than 11 million people in four South African provinces.

The water utility Medium Voltage (MV) electrical network must be kept to a highly reliable and maintainable standard to prevent premature failure. Failure of critical assets such as MV switchgear supplying and controlling the MV motors, which pump the water to maintain the water levels in the reservoirs, can cause significant water unavailability to a vast group of residents. The client can also incur exorbitant costs on reactive maintenance work.

Recently the client experienced a catastrophic failure on the MV switchgear because of electrical discharges within the insulation system that had deteriorated over time. The resulted downtime and lack of water supply caused a major upset and unhappiness amongst the client’s customers which needed to be rectified urgently.

Key Challenges

• The absence of technology to support continuous intime monitoring linked to suitable follow-up workflow processes on the critical asset.
• Due to the lack of technology, no early warning triggers were available to proactively caution the client to perform predictive maintenance on the assets and avoid costly failure and downtime.

Further challenges:

Although Martec succeeded in quickly restoring the equipment under breakdown situations and prevented the reservoirs from running dry, there is still a risk for further downtime due to the condition of some of the switchgear components after the failure. These components must be closely monitored to ensure operation within safe limits and early warning of imminent failure until they can be replaced.