Baseform helping Austin Water account for flow and capacity across entire wastewater network.

AW looks forward to expanding this capability to the entire network.

A joint presentation by Joe Smith of Austin Water and Ken Bossung of Baseform at last week’s AWWA/WEF Utility Management Conference in Dallas (TX) highlighted how Austin Water have been gaining progressively better grasp of flows and capacity in their wastewater network, to provide complete trace functionality. This is based on the ability to assign spatial billing points to the sewer lines based on location, afforded by Baseform. The software accrues this cumulatively as it flows downstream toward the WWTP, and adjusts to match WW flowmeter data by basin to approximate the Average Daily Flow (ADF) in each pipe. Through network monitoring and wet weather event detection, the software provides a base to approximate Peak Wet Weather Flow (PWWF) in each pipe. This capability provides Austin Water with an automated, rapid means to cover the entirety of its wastewater network with a reliable base for flow and capacity analysis by pipe, as opposed to the longer path in developing a full hydraulics model (which currently covers only pipes 10-inch and larger). As Joe pointed out, there is significant minimization of repetitive manual work currently done for Service Extension Requests (SERs) Reviews for smaller, not modeled pipes, which correspond to a large proportion of the network. Another key point of relevance is the ability to relate and cross-validate flow meter data and billing data. AW looks forward to expanding this capability to the entire network.

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