TechHub: Smart Sewers in Cincy, IoT Gets Sticky and Digital Twins

Cincinnati Has the Smartest Sewers on the Planet

When a summer thunderstorm dumps an inch of water on Greater Cincinnati, sensors strategically placed on flow gates, valve, pipes and storage tanks know just what they have to do in the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati.

The district’s “smart sewer” system diverts the stormwater away from overburdened areas of the system and toward interceptor tanks

and treatment facilities that have excess capacity. The high-tech but relatively low-cost solution helps Cincinnati reduce sewer overflows into rivers and streams.

Cincinnati’s system won national recognition recently in a national contest co-sponsored by Engaging Local Government Leaders and The Atlas Marketplace.

“We have hundreds of sensors in the sewers, computerized controls, and operable devices within the sewers such as gates/valves that can redirect excess flows to areas with available capacity, said Melissa Niehaus, Superintendent of MSD’s Watershed Operations division, which manages the program. “This helps keep sewage in the pipes and out of our creeks.”

To learn more about what have been dubbed the “Smartest Sewers on the Planet,” sign up to attend GrayMatter’s Transform 2018 conference July 31-Aug. 2 at Put-in-Bay Ohio.

Reese Johnson from the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati will discuss the smart sewer system and how his team has been able to significantly improve water quality.

Purdue, Virginia Researchers Develop IoT Stickers

Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Virginia have devised a method to produce film-thin circuit boards that you can peel off and stick on virtually any surface where you want to wirelessly gather data or control a device.

Want to keep tabs on the temperature around a plant to make sure it’s not too hot? Slap an IoT sticker on the pot. Perhaps you’d like to control an LED display from your laptop? Place one of these stickers on it and you’re connected.

Or maybe you have something more daring in mind.

“We could customize a sensor, stick it onto a drone, and send the drone to dangerous areas to detect gas leaks, for example,” said Chi Hwan Lee, a Purdue assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering.

You can even use a pair of scissors to trim away any unneeded sections so the IoT stickers, which resemble housing construction blueprints on a gold backing, can fit perfectly on whatever object you want to join the IoT universe.

Details of the research have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forbes: Digital twins can help CEOs prevent problems instead of react to them

Forbes contributor Dan Woods explains why CEOs should make best friends with a digital twin of their company’s operations.

To help make his point, he spoke with John Renick, senior director of product management at GE Digital.

“According to Renick, digital twins allow CEOs to better manage their businesses with more insights and data-backed analysis — something that should make CEOs the greatest digital twin evangelizers.”

The top points Woods made in favor of digital twin technology:

• Digital twins create a data-based model of assets or processes, so they can pave the way toward advanced techniques to anticipate and prevent equipment failures and find ways to optimize performance.
• Digital twins provide detailed information about large collections of key assets in an industrial landscape, so they can help determine the best way to allocate scarce investment dollars.
• Digital twins expand a culture of data-based decision-making, thus supporting all sorts of ways to continuously improve performance. 

Read more about how GrayMatter can help companies act on data they’re already collecting.