According to the WaterWorld and Wastewater Digest State of the Industry surveys, over the past 10 years, aging infrastructure is consistently ranked in the top five concerns for utility professionals. While it may be tempting to think of this as concrete and steel infrastructure — buildings, pipes, etc. — the real pain points are the engineered products, including pumps and motors.

For these assets, consistent rotational forces produce constant wear and tear, but the challenge lies in understanding the true health of the asset. Cutsforth uses its in-house-developed diagnostic models that are informed by tried and true research to sense and monitor pump health.

“We have integrated diagnostic models that help make sense of all that data to get more swiftly from ‘something’s wrong’ to ‘what’s wrong and why and what do I do about it,’” said David Bramhall, sales manager for Custforth.

In a case study provided by Cutsforth, San Jose Water annually witnessed five to 25 motor-pumps fail, which required frequent and expensive repair. With the Cutsforth InsightCM^™ platform, SJW identified the motors and pumps in need of inspection ahead of failures, which saved nearly $29,000 in savings along with repairs finishing in a matter of weeks rather than an estimated six to 12 months.

InsightCM^™

Without the right data or information, understanding motor and pump health is not possible. Vibration sensors and electronic signature analysis are vital metrics that Cutsforth’s InsightCM platform uses to learn about a pump or motor, its history and its health. Bramhall said InsightCM can give forward looking accounts of asset performance.

“We can install vibration sensors and look at the electrical signals — both the voltage and the currents — for motors and a whole lot more to help get a picture of asset health and how it’s trending and changing overtime, enabling the ability to predict failures and to prevent unnecessary downtime,” said David Bramhall, Cutsforth business development leader.

Bramhall said InsightCM is a platform into which all the data from the assets — vibrations, voltage, current, etc. — is centralized to cover both electrical and mechanical failure modes. The platform can be installed on-premise or in the cloud, offering utilities the flexibility of installing it in such a way that it is most beneficial to them. In addition to the monitoring tools, InsightCM also provides a subject matter expert view for analysis and diagnoses.

Chuck Requet, Custforth engineering manager, said for wastewater systems, pumps can take a beating, and using a total asset health tool like InsightCM can get the most out of pump and motor assets.

“The pump is moving whatever mixed water solids and everything else that’s going through it, and a lot of the pumps are vertical,” Requet said. “With a vertical pump, it is hard to sense what’s going on at the pump. You can’t just install a vibration sensor because the pump is under water, the tip of it is. So that’s why electrical signature analysis helps because you basically turn the motor into a sensor.”

How Cutsforth’s history led to providing customer value

Cutsforth got its start in 1991 producing and installing replacement brush holders for generators and exciters, making the company one of the leaders in power-generation maintenance services. By the 2010s, the company began to add monitoring solutions to its generators, and in 2022, the company acquired InsightCM from National Instruments to further leverage its expertise with electrical signature analysis. Now the company is looking to bring that expertise to markets like water and wastewater where there is a need to identify the health of aging infrastructure assets across the country.

Bramhall said in addition to the InsightCM platform, Cutsforth has a reliability services arm that can help utility leaders properly install vibration sensors, make the most out of InsightCM and even provide expert analysis and guidance. That extends even to the process and change management side of asset management.

“We can work with a company just to get them data and then get that to their IT team,” he said, “or we can provide the whole solution to them, and give them the recommendations of what to do when.”

Requet said that team can also conduct a survey of all a utility’s equipment and identify all the potential failure modes of them.

“From that, they can do a gap analysis,” Requet added. “And so it really kind of helps you budget for how to get the most bang for your buck when you’re monitoring and trying to improve your asset level.”

The future of the technology

As for the future of the company, Bramhall and Requet said the company is looking to continue highlighting its services in the business verticals such as water and wastewater. Iterating on the technology is also in the cards. Bramhall teased a future analytics platform called AdvisorDX, which will more seamlessly offer recommendations based on the monitoring data. A timeline for the release was not readily available during WEFTEC.

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