Water

The Ayase Water Purification Plant is a large facility that forms the core of the Kanagawa Water Supply Authority. It has a site area of 234,495 m² and a water supply capacity of 500,000 m³ per day. The facility commenced operation in 1998. Recently, during its 17th year of operation, its central monitoring and control equipment was given a complete overhaul to improve system reliability and make operation monitoring work more efficient.

The overhaul involved constructing a web monitoring system controlled by mobile PCs installed in electrical rooms. System security measures were also provided. The web monitoring system was provided by creating a local area network (LAN) in the facility. The system lets users bring laptops into electrical rooms to do the same monitoring work they do from the central monitoring room, which is effective for maintenance, management and servicing during accidents, maintenance, and trial operation. The security measures include using a white list method for the first time instead of the common black list method, which has high load and could potentially reduce the monitoring and control system's response time. The constructed security system disables unknown malware while reducing load.

To increase pump operation work efficiency at pump stations, Sewerage Bureau of the City of Hiroshima has installed a centralized monitoring and control system for its manned base pump stations and the unmanned pump stations under its control. The manned pump stations are the Ujina Pump Station (on the Asahimachi Water Resources Reclamation Center grid) and the Yoshijima Pump Station (on the Eba Water Resources Reclamation Center grid).

The main features are as follows:

1. Redundancy between base pump stations has been created by using the terminal server (TS) method to connect the six pump stations under the Bureau's control on a virtual private network (VPN) line, and performing dual-base communication from each pump station's controller along with the base pump station of each grid (Ujina Pump Station/Yoshijima Pump Station).
2. Management system reliability has been improved by enabling monitoring operations on the pump stations under the Bureau's control from both of the base pump stations.
3. The controllers have been made redundant to make automatic control more reliable.
4. Automatic control of sewage pumps and rainwater pumps at pump stations under the Bureau's control has been unified for more efficient monitoring and control work.

Aging water supply infrastructure combined with declining numbers of engineers are creating a need for efficient maintenance and management of water supply facilities. Small- and medium-sized organizations require urgent measures to address the issue of technology transfer. To do so, water suppliers will need to rapidly work on standardizing their operations while expanding their service areas by unifying management and sharing facilities.

To solve these issues, Hitachi is developing operation support technology designed to help water suppliers expand their service areas and standardize their operations. The technology standardizes the operations performed when maintaining and managing water supply facilities by creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) that are stored in a database. The SOPs are displayed to workers in the form of operation flows when they need to maintain or manage water supply facilities, thereby reducing errors and making it easier to evaluate conditions. The technology also facilitates data transparency and management indicator uniformity.

Hitachi will continue working on this technology to help grow water supply services and facilitate problem-solving for the maintenance and management of water supply facilities.

Seawater desalination technologies are being developed to meet rising global demand for water. Hitachi has responded by developing a high-recovery seawater reverse osmosis (RO) desalination system. Performance testing for use in the Middle East has been conducted on a prototype (with a capacity of about 500 m³/day).

While conventional seawater RO desalination systems have a water recovery rate of about 40%, Hitachi's high-recovery system improves this figure to 60%. This higher recovery rate reduces the seawater intake volume, which enables the capacity of the pre-treatment and post-treatment equipment to be reduced by about 30% and reduces the equipment's overall energy consumption by about 15%. These benefits reduce the environmental impact by conserving the source seawater and reducing the amount of pre-treatment chemicals used.

By combining this system with specialized RO membranes, Hitachi expects to be able to meet the diverse requirements of different industries and regions by further improving energy efficiency and offering a wide variety of water production systems.

Since FY2009, Hitachi has provided a training program for young engineers from Republic of South Africa who are invited to Japan every year. The program is organized in collaboration with the South African government's Department of Science and Technology (DST), and is one example of Hitachi's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Around five young engineers working in areas related to water treatment and water management at organizations such as local governments and waterworks have been invited annually since FY2015. They are trained for two months in Japan through a collaboration among Hitachi Group companies, outside partner institutions, waterworks, and similar organizations.

Six trainees were invited in FY2017. They attended lectures and received technical training in areas such as monitoring and control technology, and water treatment technology. They were also able to observe Japanese waterworks facilities, desalination plants, and manufacturing plants for water infrastructure products.

The human resources education provided by this program lets the Hitachi Group help solve a variety of issues related to water and the environment.