Smart wastewater doesn't waste water

Smart city initiatives around the world aim to improve citizens' quality of life while making more efficient use of precious resources like energy and water. Smart wastewater management systems detect impending blockages in time to deploy cleaning vehicles like the state-of-the-art IndiCycler from Aryan Pumps & Enviro Solutions. Featuring a robust mobile controller and modular software from B&R, it does the job efficiently and sustainably by recycling extracted sewage water.

Cleaning and maintaining these systems is a job for municipal vehicles like the IndiCycler from Aryan Pumps & Enviro Solutions. "One of the primary goals of smart wastewater management is to conserve water," says Aryan's chairman and managing director, Prashant Subhash Sutar. "So it only makes sense that our vehicles treat the precious resource with the same amount of respect." To do that, those vehicles must be equipped with automation technology that performs reliably under the harsh conditions on the road.

Headquartered in Pune, India, Aryan offers a variety of municipal vehicles for solid and liquid waste management as well as firefighting and rescue operations. To keep wastewater flowing smoothly, Aryan has developed a state-of-the-art sewer cleaning vehicle that recycles extracted sewage water and reuses it for subsequent jetting operations. "That's one feature that really makes us stand out from the competition," notes Sutar. It makes the vehicle more efficient and environmentally friendly, both by reducing freshwater consumption and by eliminating extra trips otherwise required to refill the tanks.

One of the most efficient and powerful machines of its kind on the international market, the IndiCycler incorporates a state-of-art filter system, positive displacement vacuum pump driven by an auxiliary engine, jetting pump and control system. The entire solution can be mounted on commercial vehicle chassis of different sizes, depending upon the required capacity of the freshwater and sludge tanks.

The IndiCycler performs high-pressure jetting operations to dislodge solid waste and silt that has settled in sewer lines. It is able to desilt and unclog lines ranging from 50 to 900 millimeters in diameter. It also performs suction operations to remove sludge from depths of up to 8 meters. In blow-back operation, silt accumulated in manholes or septic tanks is mixed with water to create a slurry that can then be extracted.

"Especially in the field of waste management, municipal vehicles are very cost competitive, yet demand a decent amount of automation," explains Sutar. "With B&R's robust X90 controller, we were able to save the considerable cost of cabinets and mount it directly on the vehicle." The X90 mobile controller is designed especially for the kind of harsh environment and conditions where the IndiCycler is used, and its voltage range allows it to be powered using the vehicle's battery. "We evaluated many solutions and systems with respect to performance and our technical team was thoroughly impressed with the performance of B&R system for our IndiCycler."

Aryan also made use of B&R's ready-made mapp Technology software components. "That reduced the time and cost of developing and testing the control application and the intuitive HMI system, which is displayed on a mobile touchscreen operator terminal in a rugged stainless steel housing," says Sutar. B&R's integrated development environment, Automation Studio, made it easy for Aryan's developers to create modular software using their preferred language. End users can easily enable and disable options for different machine types via the HMI screen.

"We have been very impressed by both the convenience of B&R's software and the robust performance of its hardware under extreme conditions," concludes Sutar. "Working with B&R came very naturally, and together, we're contributing to a cleaner, more environmentally friendly India."