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As the impending water crisis dominates news headlines across the country, technology can play a critical role in efficient water management. Fluxgen Engineering Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup, used IoT and AI to help manage and regulate water usage in industries. Currently, the company has more than 20 industrial customers, helping monitor, analyze water consumption, leakage and excessive water usage in food processing & manufacturing plants.
Ganesh Shankar, founder & CEO of FluxGen says the goal of FluxGen is to help industries become water positive, and aims to help save 1 billion litres of water everyday using his product AquaGen.
A report released by NITI Aayog has stated that India is currently facing its worst ever water crisis, with 21 cities likely to run out of groundwater by 2020. These cities include New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai – home to India’s major industries, enterprises and urban ecosystems. Not only will water shortage affect quality of life of residents of these cities, but also massively impact the national GDP.
However, Shankar believes technology can provide tool and solutions to manage water usage more responsibly. AquaGen was put to the test at a dairy production unit in Puducherry and the results were highly rewarding.
Dairy Production Unit In Puducherry Implements AquaGen; Optimises Water Usage
Winner Dairy’s dairy production unit outlet in Puducherry processes nearly 250,000 litres of milk everyday, and produces milk-based by-products as well. The milk brought into the plant is first chilled, stored, filtered, clarified and then sent to the Central Processing Unit. After this, it is forwarded to various units for by milk packaging and by-product manufacturing. Across each of these processes, roughly 400,000 litres of water is consumed daily – either as RO (reverse osmosis) water, soft water or raw/hard water. The source of water is either from nearby borewells or external vendors.
The amount of water used in processing was not being measured scientifically and in tune with the plant’s actual requirements. Over a period of time, the plant officials noticed that groundwater levels began falling, and water was becoming scarce. Since water is RO-purified and softened, it added to the plant’s operational costs.
How Did AquaGen Help?
The facility has a Central Processing Unit, where the milk brought into the plant begins its processing journey. It is pasteurized, homogenized and cream separated. Then, the processed milk is sent to other units of the plant to pack or make by-products out off. The water being used at the Central processing unit is water from the RO plant, fed through the pumphouse. The line which carries water from the RO output splits into two lines – one feeds the Central Processing Unit and the other, the Ultra Heat Treatment Plant.
The previous water infrastructure was equipped with a water flow meter based on:
Input of the RO plant
Input of the Central Processing Unit
Input of the Ultra-Heat Treatment Unit
The facility’s mechanical engineering team previously had personnel to manually note down the values at these flow meters daily at 6 am and then the subsequent day, giving a periodic account of water being used by the facility during a 24-hour shift.
However, this system had several challenges:
Meters are placed in precarious spots, making it hard to obtain readings
Manual errors while noting down values
Inaccurate readings lead to incorrect cost economics (as water plays a major role in cost economics)
Inconsistent water consumption led to skewed production metrics
Inaccurate assessment of production efficiency
No real-time data of water consumption as values were noted down only once a day
The AquaGen cloud connector was connected to the plant’s flowmeter. The system measures the water consumption at various points within the infrastructure, calculates total water usage and health of the infrastructure. This consumption pattern ensures a healthy and comprehensive water infrastructure. AquaGen monitors the level of the water in OHTs and sumps ensuring the availability of sufficient water. Moreover, the user can interact with AquaGen through the mobile application or remote desktop application.
Upon installation, data was collected and provided to the ground staff and the plant manager on a mobile application. In a month’s time, certain anomalies were noticed with the help of the analytics from AquaGen. The solution helped identify various issues mentioned below and aided the plant identify inefficiencies in their water infrastructure.
Poor RO Plant Health: Why Was This A Setback?
Rejection rate is an important property of the reverse osmosis membrane. Since RO membranes are designed to remove salts and other impurities, rejection rate is the most meaningful way to measure performance. Rejection rate is a direct measure of the performance of an RO plant. AquaGen, at the Input of the RO purifier, provides input quantity, and at the Output Post, RO processing of water quantities into the Central processing and UHT lines was done. It was noticed that the rejection was very inconsistent ranging from 10% to 50%. The plant then further ran a thorough look into the same, only to find out that their RO membrane needed a replacement. This would also contribute to the quality of water being used in the milk processing.
AquaGen can be potentially used to measure the health performance of RO plants and water softening plants remotely, helping in preventive maintenance leading to reduced lead times.
Excess Water Consumption Detected and Notified
The pasteurization process is carried out in the machinery in the Central Processing Unit, which uses a particular amount of water. During the process, RO water is used to mix with the milk to balance. Apart from that, soft water is used to carry out the Clean-in-Process (CIP) cycles manually, after which the processed milk is stored in cold storage tanks.
Water consumption was tracked on a daily basis in the unit. Rising use of water was a constant issues for the maintenance engineer. With the help of the AquaGen Cloud Connector at the Input of the Processing unit in addition to continuous reports and analytics, AquaGen had helped identify spikes in daily water consumption, which actually were manual CIPs being carried out by different ground staff. This meant that for the same process, different people were using different quantities of water. This needed to be benchmarked so they could reduce the use of excess water used by ground staff. AquaGen’s Alerts and Notifications feature helped the Maintenance engineer keep a tab on water usage were kept within limits, with the goal to optimize water consumption over a period of time. AquaGen managed to reduce up to 15% of water usage.
Milk to Water Ratio: Why This Is So Important
In any dairy industry, one of the most crucial parameters deciding the efficiency and productivity of the industry is the milk-to-water ratio. It is the measure of the total amount of water used in processing one litre of milk at the facility. It is an indicator of water efficiency and productivity of the plant. A plant with ‘milk to water ratio’ of 1 to 1.9 is considered healthy.
At this plant, Aquagen which was installed at the UHT section, provided the ground staff an accurate measure of the milk to water ratio at this particular section everyday, helping them keep track of the trend in which they were processing milk.
For instance, ratios for the month of November 2018 were rather inconsistent, ranging from 1.88 to 6.10. This also helped find out that their average milk to water ratio was on a rise roughly about 3.12, which wasn’t favourable. AquaGen had given the plant a daily update on their ratio, which was otherwise calculated once a month.
The AquaGen Impact:
The AquaGen system has brought about the following changes in Puducherry’s Winner Dairy farm
Help them Identify the health of RO and softener plants, thereby enabling scientific assessmenent of preventive maintenance.
Excess consumption detection, alerts, and notifications leading to a 15% water usage reduction translating to monetary savings.
Real-time productivity and water consumption monitoring, helping the executive of the firm keep track of productivity trends and monitor assets.
Listen to what Ayyanar, manager of Winner Dairy has to say about FluxGen’s technology solution:
Thank you for reading our weekly Innovate2Transform success story, where we bring to you the leaders of the industry talk about the latest in innovation, technology and trends in their industry sectors.
If your startup or company has devised a stellar solution that has been adopted in the industry and you want to share your success story with us, write to sindhuja@nasscom.in or pritha@nasscom.in
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