Optimising Performance at Beckton Wastewater Treatment Works with a Digital Twin

Beckton Sewage Treatment Works (STW) is a heritage facility first constructed in 1864 to support London’s new sewer system and improve public health. Over the years it has been frequently upgraded and expanded to meet the needs of London’s growing population and to further improve environmental and public health. Today Thames Water manage the waste of 3.5 million customers at Beckton STW and are undertaking a £125m capital investment project to ensure they can meet the demand of future population growth. However, as technology, regulations, and public expectations change – alongside shifting climate, sea levels and weather patterns – accurately judging where and how much to invest has become uniquely challenging. 

Major upgrades, as well as regularly scheduled maintenance and repairs, create risk for the business, increasing the risk of above-regulation effluent emissions, fines, and harm to environmental or public health. The key to managing this risk is data. Beckton possesses a wealth of historical data, demonstrating capacity and risk during varying conditions and demand. They also have the potential to collect detailed data around the site on a day-to-day basis. Taken together, this information can provide insight into the condition of facilities, diagnose maintenance and efficiency problems, manage risk, and help the Beckton team make informed decisions. First, however, Thames Water needed a solution that would help them collect, understand, and use this data, rendering the overwhelming quantity of information into something accessible and actionable. 

Finding a solution that worked for Beckton 

The AtkinsRéalis team were tasked with helping Thames Water explore how a digital twin or similar digital solution could be employed to help them integrate and manage their data, and then to support implementation of the preferred option.  

We began with a two-part exploration process to identify Beckton’s requirements, and to understand how feasible it would be to deliver these features through a digital twin. This required a thorough assessment of their existing facilities, assets, and technology stack, as well as of what benefits and value they were looking to capture. 

To support this process, our team worked with staff around the Beckton facility to develop potential use cases, from a way to predict when equipment would need replacing to a tool for training and risk management. Once we had identified these use cases, we then helped Thames Water quantify and compare them through a cost benefit analysis process. This allowed us to both understand the potential benefits of a mature digital twin, and to isolate those key use cases that would be used to develop the minimum viable product (MVP) for the pilot. 

Bringing the physical and digital together

A digital twin is a realistic digital representation of assets, processes, or systems in the built or natural environment. Their complexity and connectedness vary according to the needs of the owner and technological maturity, but digital twins are primarily used to monitor systems, display information in an intuitive format, and simulate different conditions and scenarios on the physical asset.  

To support Thames Water in the management of their Beckton site, our team designed a digital twin that could help them fulfil three primary aims: 

1. To optimise their use of assets, allowing them to reduce energy consumption and costs.  
2. To enhance their asset maintenance and reduce unnecessary repairs and risk of emissions above the regulated levels. 
3. To inform their investment decisions, so they could more accurately predict what facilities they would need to build and update.  

This required the twin to have three key capabilities: performance dashboards, 3D representation and model simulation (the ability to simulate different conditions on the system, such as varying tides or assets out of service). One of Beckton’s three Activated Sludge Plants was selected for the MVP, representing about 20% of the site’s total capacity. 

After several decades of continuous operation, there were significant differences between some of the assets and their documentation. Some instruments only existed on paper after being removed, broken, or updated, and performance in several of the aeration streams was being impacted by plant growth. This meant that any twin produced solely from blueprints and existing records would have limited usefulness. To rectify this, our team spent time on-site, comparing each asset to its records and taking new data to allow the software team to model important changes –. This helped us ensure that the twin would produce actionable insights, accurately modelling an aging asset base to facilitate informed decision-making. 

We worked closely with partner Explore AI to combine different biological, hydraulic and pneumatic modelling tools into a single integrated cloud-based model. This was a unique, first-of-its kind challenge, requiring close collaboration between the modelling software vendors and our engineers and project team. Importantly, this integration allowed us to provide a seamless and intuitive user experience, allowing users to simulate different scenarios and operating conditions and understand and predict associated risk, emissions, and operating costs. 

Delivering the future of waste management  

Our team successfully delivered the digital twin MVP to Thames Water in July 2022 and identified the benefits that could be delivered by this approach when embedded into the business. This MVP digital twin can help the Beckton team: 

• Predict and test risk 
• Reduce energy consumption 
• Make informed long-term capital investment and planning decisions 
• Optimise maintenance interventions 

What’s more, while the digital twin will need to be fully embedded in the business before it can deliver on all of its potential, the flexibility of the model means it could easily be extended to cover Beckton’s other facilities or to support future initiatives – such as reducing the site’s carbon footprint, increasing water quality, or optimising for any other input or output.   

The Beckton MVP also allowed us to quantify some of the potential use case benefits, including a 20% reduction in energy costs for ASP2. 

We are excited to see how the digital roadmap developed at Beckton can be further expanded and refined in subsequent projects, and how the value realised on the project can be used to inform future decision making and ensure that London’s sewage treatment requirements are met for years to come.  

Find out more about our digital capabilities here.