Over £5m worth of funding has been awarded to Northumbrian Water for a trio of ground-breaking innovation projects - which are set to protect the environment and improve services for customers.
3D printed concrete, AI-managed alarm systems and a water-quality improvement platform are among the innovative projects set to get underway after the water company successfully won three bids in the Ofwat Innovation Fund’s Breakthrough Challenge.
The three projects, called Printfrastructure, Smart Alarm Management (SAM) and OCI³ (Open Catchment Intelligence, Insights & Integration) will now be progressed by the water company in order to make services even better for customers across the North East.
Printfrastructure, which received £1.9m worth of funding, will use large-scale 3D concrete printing for wastewater infrastructure – meaning that carbon emissions will be dramatically lowered for on-site construction. As well as helping to protect the environment, it will help to speed up delivery of capital investment, reduce costs, ease supply‑chain pressures, use smarter materials and increase resilience in services.
The second project, SAM, will help teams in control centres prioritise warning alarms, enabling faster and more informed decisions to be made – through a combination of AI, machine-learning and data-modelling.
This £1.6m project will turn complex alarms into clear, helpful insights to enable better decision-making processes, meaning that teams can quickly understand what’s happening, why it matters and what to do next - allowing faster actions to be taken for customers and the environment.
Finally, the OCI³ project, which was awarded £2m, will create the UK’s first, free, open-source tool to understand river health, combining data from water companies, regulators, citizen scientists and satellites.
Using complex water quality data, it will be transformed into an accessible platform which shows teams where action will have the biggest impact – helping organisations and communities work together to target solutions that will improve river water quality.
Angela MacOscar, Head of Innovation at Northumbrian Water, said: “Each of these projects is truly exceptional in their own way, and all will have huge benefits to our customers, the environment and the local economy in the future.
“They will all allow us to build faster, react quicker to issues and will really help us to protect the beautiful waterways and ecosystems across our region.
“We have some incredible partners across these three projects, and I am excited for us to all collaborate and drive innovation forward as we deliver each of them together.”
Since the Water Breakthrough Challenge started six years ago, Northumbrian Water has scooped 22 of the winning bids– more than any other company in the water sector.
The Ofwat Innovation Fund is a key pillar in Ofwat’s mission to drive innovation that ensures the water sector is ready for the challenges of the future and results in better outcomes for customers and the environment. It is delivered by innovation prize experts Challenge Works (part of the Nesta group), in partnership with Arup and Isle Utilities.
To find out more about all of the Water Breakthrough Challenge winners, visit - waterinnovation.challenges.org