Bentley Incorporated : "Bentley's WaterGems and StaadPro helped us to efficiently design the water supply scheme"

Last December, Bentley Systems announced the winners of the 2021 Going Digital Awards in Infrastructure. Every year, Bentley's awards recognize the extraordinary work of Bentley software users advancing infrastructure design, construction, and operations throughout the world. The awards program has two water categories: Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants and Water, Wastewater and Stormwater Networks. Smart Water Magazine is conducting interviews with the winners and finalists of these two categories.

In this first interview, we hear about the project Leduki Group of Villages Water Supply Scheme, by ATLC Infraconsultants Pvt. Ltd. A finalist in the Water, Wastewater and Stormwater Networks category, the project is located in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, India, an area that spreads over 4,525 square kilometres. The Leduki Village water supply scheme proposes a piped water supply system to ensure the distribution of treated water to 128 villages.

The project team needed comprehensive hydraulic modelling technology to determine an optimal network alignment, plan district metered areas, ensure equipment safety, and provide digital deliverables to the client. They selected OpenFlows WaterGEMS to model and visualize the project location and new piping network. The software helped analyse 125 kilometres of pumping main, optimizing the design scheme and saving costs on electricity, machinery, and the operating and maintenance costs associated with pumping equipment. STAAD facilitated structural design of the elevated service reservoir and water treatment plant. Using Bentley's integrated technology solutions, the project was delivered almost a month ahead of schedule.

Question: To what extent can digital tools help improve water infrastructure projects' design, construction and operations?

Answer: A digital twin is a virtual representation of the physical world. The process of generation of a water infrastructure's digital twin begins with the digitisation of routinely collected data which is often in paper records and spreadsheets which are not connected. The generation of a water system's digital twin involves the unification of reality models and GIS models with virtual engineering models. Also digital twins are continuously updated with real-time data from SCADA systems, sensors, meters and other measured sources. This results in an intelligent and connected digital infrastructure model that greatly supports planning, design, construction and operation for smart water networks.

Q: What capabilities of Bentley's tools do you think have been key for the success of your project?

A: Bentley's WaterGems and StaadPro are state of the art software that helped us to efficiently design the water supply scheme for the Leduki group of villages. Tools such as Model Builder aided in the quick creation of a network from multiple sources such as GIS and or Autocad survey files. The terrain extraction tool was of immense help as well in assigning the ground elevation values to the network. Scenarios and alternatives resulted in the analysis and design of the different network components in a single model. All these and many other tools resulted in the speedy and successful completion of the project.

Q: Could you briefly explain what have been the social, economic and environmental impacts of your project?

A: The main socio-economic impact of this project is the uninterrupted supply of potable drinking water to the residents of the villages. This project will provide the residents of the villages access to clean drinking water thereby raising their quality of life. Another positive impact of this project is employment potential. This project will require a substantial amount of manpower in its execution stage thereby creating a huge opportunity for the employment of local residents.

Q: What benefits would you highlight from the use of digital tools in terms of collaboration between the different teams and the clients?

A: Bing map integration into WaterGems greatly assisted in the visualisation of the project location, thereby increasing the graphical appeal of the project to the client.

Q: Can you comment on the overall cost-effectiveness of using Bentley's tools in the project?

A: Because of the usage of Bentley's tools, we were able to design the most cost-effective water supply scheme 30 days prior to the scheduled date. This caused a great reduction in cost in terms of manpower required for the completion of the project.