How Condition-Based Monitoring (CbM) Technology Can Achieve Desalination with Greater Energy Efficiency

What if we could drink seawater? It would have a huge impact on agriculture, sustainability and global quality of life, but the energy requirements would be equally great. Desalination technology is very power hungry and often takes a lot of time and resources to implement.

Any improvement in the efficiency of this technology is quite noticeable. Now, with the OtoSense™ platform developed by ADI, it suddenly seems that increased efficiency is within our reach.

OtoSense is a Condition-Based Monitoring (CbM) technology platform designed to continuously and accurately detect and monitor the asset health status of machines and other types of critical equipment. It can accumulate data about the condition of machines more quickly and accurately than any other sensing platform. The data is provided through AI software to detect, predict and prevent possible events, thereby improving uptime and quality while reducing maintenance and downtime costs. This is a unique and powerful tool for a wide range of applications.

According to a report released in October 2019 by the Global Water Institute, approximately 1 percent of the global population relies on desalinated water to meet their daily needs, but that number is expected to grow to 14 percent by 2025. Desalination will become increasingly necessary as more and more countries are affected by severe droughts caused by climate change. To meet the demand for desalination technologies, we must improve the ease of implementation, reliability and energy efficiency. cbM helps to achieve this goal. For example, Otosense can be used to test desalination pumps late in production to ensure the health and reliability of this vital system. With Otosense, such energy-intensive tests run 23% faster, while energy requirements are reduced. In the future, these tests may run up to 50% faster.

Consuming less energy to provide reasonably priced potable fresh water is just one example of the potential impact of condition monitoring on power consumption. Fifty percent of the world’s electricity is used to drive motors. By using CbM technology to ensure that machines operate at peak efficiency, it can help industries such as energy, manufacturing, agriculture and transportation reduce their carbon emissions by 15 percent – one third of the 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions needed by 2030.

Increased productivity, improved quality, reduced maintenance costs and lower energy consumption can all help improve overall cost efficiency. This means that this monitoring of asset health promises to transform a previously costly business model into a viable one. But CbM technology has even greater potential to help mitigate as well as reverse the global climate change situation. We are working with leading companies around the world to not only develop breakthrough technologies, but also to introduce breakthrough inventions that can improve human life and the planet’s environment.