‘Water management is ridiculous here’

Boxes of cup-a-soup, posters on the walls, a radio in a corner… signs of human habitation are everywhere in the control centre of Europe’s largest pumping station, situated in the coastal town of IJmuiden. From this building, six pumps can be instructed to move 260,000 liters of water per second with a single mouse click, all for the purpose of maintaining the right water levels in the North Sea Canal. But while outside big oil tankers steadily sail towards this combined sluice and pumping station, inside the control centre is deserted.
This station used to be manned day and night by technicians who would turn on the pumps at full throttle when the canal’s water level rose just above the ideal safety and navigation depth. But that all ended a couple years ago, when dr. Peter Jules van Overloop (faculty of Civil Engineering & Geosciences) installed a computer system nearby.

Now the pumps are controlled by the lockkeepers who man the (Oranjesluizen) sluices located about twenty kilometers inland, just in front of Amsterdam. The computer program tells the

lockkeepers what depths they can expect from the hinterland waterways, and when the best time to pump is.
“The computer plays with the margins,” Van Overloop says. “It weighs the pros and cons of pumping, calculating for instance whether it’s possible to wait a little longer, until low tide. Pumping during high tide is expensive, because the pumps have to work harder.”

The program produced some real eye-openers. Van Overloop: “At one point the program told us to pump water from the canal downwards to the sea during low tide, which is unheard of. If you open the sluices, the water flows out automatically. But the computer calculated that we had to get rid of as much water as possible during low tide. If we had only opened the sluices, we still would have had lots of water left to pump after the sea had risen again, meaning we would have to pump harder.”

According to Peter Beuse, of the national water board, Rijkswaterstaat, who initially elicited Van Overloop’s help, the computer program cut the pumps’ energy costs  by 20 percent, from around one million euro a year to 800,000 euro. “And what’s more,” he adds, “the system also helps to regulate the water flows in such a manner that fish can pass through the sluices.”
If it’s up to Van Overloop, this slightly more centralized way of managing the water in the North Sea Canal, the IJ Bay in Amsterdam, and the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal (also regulated by the Oranjesluizen), is just a taste of what’s to come.

Van Overloop, together with co-researcher Ties Rijcken, envisions one single central control centre in Holland (in Lelystad) in 2020, which would calculate all the best options and regulate all pumps and sluices.
“Everybody is so proud of Dutch water management, but actually we use a ridiculously simplistic approach. Water managers only manage the water level in their region, yet the waterways in Holland form one big system. We can regulate it much more effectively if we take that into account.”
Such a centre could for instance anticipate major rainfall events, like the one that occurred in 1998, and then lower the water levels of certain rivers, canals and lakes. And that could save a lot of money, Van Overloop believes.
“Maybe at some point we’d have to halt shipping traffic for a day,” he says. “We have to do away with holy rules that protect shipping at all costs. We can calculate if that would weigh up to the extra costs we would otherwise incur due to damage during such events.”

An interesting thought, Beuse agrees. “But is it feasible,” he skeptically asks himself. “A lot of international regulations are in play, since we share the rivers with neighboring countries, and this makes it all very complicated.”

On 5 December, TU Delft PhD student Rintze Zelle (biotechnology) won second prize in the worldwide Knovel University Challenge. Zelle’s prize was an iPod Nano. The more than 7,000 students from 40 universities who participated in the Knovel University Challenge had to answer 12 challenging questions using information from Knovel e-books, with specialize in applied sciences. The ‘Grand Prize’ first-place winner of the Knovel University Challenge was Desauna Tabor of the University of Cincinnati (US). She won a Nintendo Wii.