20.01.2021
Umwelttechnik

Virtual remote commissioning of wastewater treatment plants in Indonesia

The pandemic brings along new challenges, like, for example, the commissioning of state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plants in distant regions in times of travel restrictions: another task that WEHRLE has successfully mastered!

Virtual remote commissioning of wastewater treatment plants in Indonesia - WEHRLE

Highly loaded wastewater from landfills, so-called leachate, is a threat to ground water and the health of many people in developing and emerging countries. Leachate treatment is thus urgently needed. Therefore, the treatment of leachate cannot wait for the pandemic to end, as it is the case for the new landfills built in Indonesia as part of the ERiC (Emission Reduction in Cities) project series. The leachate treatment plants for those new landfills were built as high-performance Membrane Bioreactors (MBR) based on WEHRLE’s proven BIOMEMBRAT® process. Only the commissioning was still to be carried out when the pandemic struck, making it impossible to send the responsible experts.

WEHRLE had already worked with modern means of communication before the pandemic started. Switching from conferences to webinars, from trade fairs to online events, organizing virtual employee meetings and video conferences instead of customer visits were therefore measures which had already been technically prepared. However, a quick and reliable solution for the commissioning of an entire wastewater treatment plant had still to be found.

For this purpose, WEHRLE has now created the conditions for live remote commissioning via virtual reality and used this option for the projects in Indonesia for the first time. The Indonesian staff on site wears a virtual reality headset, transmitting the employee’s view to Germany in real time. Project Manager Martin Schaub and his colleague Widyananda Suwito, who additionally assumes the interpreter function, can thus give precise instructions. “It is a new challenge for us, but we are glad to be able to ideally support our client, even in times of covid-19”, says Martin Schaub, Project Manager at WEHRLE.

Virtual remote commissioning of wastewater treatment plants in Indonesia - WEHRLE

The results of the virtual remote commissioning are quite positive so that this option will certainly be used more often in the future.