Voith has teamed up with digital specialist Ray Sono to launch a digital service product that will allow operators of small hydropower projects to manage their station directly from mobile devices, with the system currently in use in Indonesia.
The Cloud-based solution ‘Hydro Pocket’ provides real-time data from small and medium-sized hydropower plants directly on mobile devices.
According to Voith, thanks to the transparent view of assets, assistance in the form of intelligent analysis methods, maintenance and repair planning can be optimized and faults or unplanned downtime can be reduced. “The application can be intuitively operated via a clearly configured dashboard, and can map individual power units, complete stations or even entire fleets. These can be displayed on a computer, smartphone or tablet,” explained Dr. Tobias Keitel, Chief Operations Officer at Voith Hydro.
Hydro Pocket has been designed to be adapted to individual needs and user requirements, while also quick to install and easy to configure, said Voith. The user receives a starter kit to assist in this process, and attaches the hardware contained in the kit to the power plant. The task of configuring the system is subsequently performed by Voith, with the entire process taking less than four weeks to complete.
The three pillars covered by the product are the monitoring, analysis and management of the system.
Indonesian project Sion acted as a pilot project for the product. The valuable findings made during this project contributed significantly to the expansion and configuration of the functions and features. “In addition to focusing on user experience, user interfaces, and the technical stability of the application, feedback from initial customers was also taken into account to develop a market-ready solution,” Sebastian Krüger, Executive Board member of Ray Sono, said.
In addition to the 12MW system at Sion, which has been using Hydro Pocket since March 2022, there are also six other systems in Europe and Southeast Asia, which are already putting Hydro Pocket to the test.
