Data smarts keep CityLink pumps on point
CityLink’s pumps transfer around 185 million litres of ground water every year, keeping our tunnels and surrounding buildings structurally sound. But what happens if those pumps break down?
Building a tunnel in Melbourne’s silty soil is not an easy task. If you’ve ever dug a big hole at the beach, you’ll know what I mean. As soon as you go deep enough, your sandy engineering feat starts to fill with water.
So, to protect the groundwater from seeping through like this, we use bores and pumps to move the water away from the tunnel. And this isn’t just to keep the tunnel dry, it also prevents movement in the tunnel asset itself.
As we drain more than six Olympic swimming pools worth of water each month, if one pump underperforms there’s an obvious safety risk. This is where our pump maintenance dashboard comes in, displaying data like run-hours, current draw, water levels, and flow rates for our teams to monitor in real time.
Analytics shine a light on potential problems
In February, our dashboard alerted the team to a pump failure that would have been more difficult to detect without analytics.
The alert told us that there was an issue with the water level on the pump, so our mechanical and electrical maintenance team jumped into action to investigate. They discovered that an impeller had come off, prompting them to replace the pump.
The opposite of a turbine, an impeller is a rotor that helps increase water flow and pressure. It’s only visible once the pump is removed and inspectors can look into the pump chamber. Meaning that, without our data notifications, we wouldn’t have known there was a problem. Undetected, this issue could’ve caused expensive and time-consuming problems in the future.
Monitoring an asset’s health in real time lets us do predictive maintenance
In collaboration with our Enterprise Data Analytics team, we have created a platform for predictive monitoring and maintenance — meaning the more data this platform ingests, the smarter it gets.
By improving our real time maintenance surveillance for CityLink, we are working to shift to a predictive maintenance philosophy. And all the real-time data that we get only helps make our platform work better.
Starting this work in Victoria, we’re in the process of rolling it out across the whole company. We have developed water pump health and usage monitoring systems for Airport Link in Queensland and the Eastern Distributor in NSW.
Data literacy leads to a more resilient operational environment
The process of taking our business on the data literacy journey cannot be understated. I really believe recording and analysing data is a skill set that needs to be developed within all staff.
Why? Because systems like this put information and insights directly in the hands of decision makers. It gives them the information they need to manage their own water pumps, rather than going through a third party, so it’s important that they understand it.
Using data driven decision making to reduce risk and prevent failures before they happen is a big win. It saves time, it has saved and will continue to save money, and it creates a more resilient operational environment for the future.
