Managing Water Hammer

Water hammer and pressure surges damage piping systems and can lead to leaks and breaks. So how can we address these issues around water hammer and pressure surges? If designing a brand new pump system, it can be easier to design newer technologies into the system, but what about existing installations?

In some cases, an upgrade of existing equipment in your water or wastewater facility can save maintenance professionals from the headache of water hammer. When it comes to VFDs, ABB Drives has engineered a drive to address these issues for the industry.

The built-in pump control features of the ACQ580 drive addresses these issues in several ways.

The ACQ580’s soft pipe fill mode gently increases pressure during pipe filling. With proper ramp times and PID algorithms, non-revenue water is decreased and energy savings increased.

With built-in multi-pump functionality, the ACQ580 offers better staging and de-staging of pumps in a parallel system. By maintaining constant pressure and/or flow, wear and tear on the equipment is minimized. In addition, ABB softstarters are well-suited for full speed pump applications. The soft ramping features increase pump life by reducing water hammer, and the pump cleaning feature reduces impeller buildup.

Leaks are hard to find – especially at low flow. To solve this problem, it’s necessary to have a real-time picture of conditions in the water or wastewater distribution network. This makes measurement critical – which is why ABB offers the battery-powered AquaMaster. The AquaMaster is an electromagnetic flowmeter that provides real-time data to allow for early measurements from maximum peak daytime rates down to extremely low flows.

The AquaMaster provides remote monitoring of equipment located either underground or in difficult-to-access locations and can help identify leaks to enable maintenance teams to be deployed proactively.

Get quality data. By combining accurate flowmeter information with water-specific drive functionality, you get more reliable, stable, and high quality data. This helps generate added value by providing the insight needed to proactively understand, operate, analyze, and maintain water systems.