Every water supply district experiences unnecessary losses from leakage and expenses for repairing line breaks. A program of advanced pressure control can help alleviate these losses and expense.

The Asheville water supply district is a medium-sized system with 1400 miles of pipe over 60,000 services, said Travis Mortier, supervisor of the valve/leak detection crew, City of Asheville in a webinar about how the city is exploring advanced pressure control.

The Asheville system consists of 30 major pressure zones with 20 child pressure zones within them. The system has the capacity for delivering over 40 million gallons per day, according to a presentation from www.ncsafewater.com.

As immersive reality technologies continue to grow in scope and scale, more industrial applications are being developed to solve longstanding issues. Augmented, mixed, and virtual reality technologies represent a path forward that could improve most aspects of plant planning, personnel training and maintenance.

Spanning the gap between digital and physical spaces, immersion technology has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Composed primarily of augmented reality and virtual reality, it seeks to supplement or wholly create an environment by superimposing data and visuals for a variety of applications. Though it has roots in the entertainment industry, immersion technology holds infinite potential for industrial applications, including maintenance and training functions.

There’s a lot to know about valves in order to select the right ones and use them effectively. Consultant Greg McMillan shared some of his deep knowledge acquired during more than 50 years industry experience in a webinar from the International Society of Automation (ISA). Here are a few of his insights. Watch (and study) the webinar for more.

McMillan started out with some suggestions about areas that need special care. Friction and backlash account for many problems, but suppliers, in general, do not provide data about them, or if the data is available, it is often misinterpreted by the end user.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) includes, among other capabilities, monitoring equipment and process parameters using sensors connected to networks. In addition, some maintenance systems using IIoT can now use artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase process uptime and reliability to previously unheard-of levels.