VorTech Derisks Innovative Technology to Aid Global Water Sustainability Challenges Using Cloud-Native Simulations on AWS

Water and wastewater management companies face many challenges that make it difficult to treat and maintain clean drinking water. “The increase in the human population means that more volumes of wastewater are being produced, which is coupled with energy intensity and increasing electricity costs, resulting in a significant challenge,” says Sean Mulligan, CEO and founder at VorTech. “Companies are also striving for net zero while dealing with aging infrastructure. They’re forced to do a lot more with a lot less.”

VorTech was founded in 2019, with the mission of helping utility and water companies overcome these challenges through sustainable wastewater treatment processes. Its flagship patented product solution, Vortex Powered Aeration, aerates water through cyclonic flow, a process based on computational fluid dynamics. A variation of the technology also generates renewable energy from low-head hydropower opportunities in water treatment facilities. To add to its sustainability efforts, VorTech designs its products with virtually 100 percent recyclable components.

One of the hurdles that VorTech helps its customers with is planning for the installation and maintenance of its equipment. “The wastewater industry is highly risk averse,” says Mulligan. “We needed to build traction at a faster rate compared with other technologies that exist.” VorTech knew it could demonstrate the value of its products by creating simulations that account for the fluid-structural interactions that might occur. So VorTech turned to CADFEM, an AWS Partner, to architect a cloud-native environment that would scale to compute-intensive workloads. “The capability to create complex simulations 20 years ago would have been virtually impossible, particularly for an early phase startup like us,” says Paul Mannion, computational fluid dynamics lead at VorTech. “Because we’ve had the opportunity to simulate on AWS alongside CADFEM, we’ve been able to accelerate toward our mission from day one.”

Through its collaboration with CADFEM, VorTech adopted Ansys CFX, Ansys Fluent, and Ansys Mechanical simulations to create digital twins of its customers’ industrial and municipal water treatment plants. VorTech supports the water management community by providing advanced multiphase flow simulations of complex infrastructure projects, such as deep tunnels and pumping stations, to evaluate mixing processes or sedimentary buildup. “We can design systems around what we learn through simulations and optimize client designs at an early stage,” says Mannion. “Our simulations save an incredible amount of capital expenditure, which means that our customers can finish their projects on time.”

VorTech can access these simulations through a customer portal built and provided by CADFEM. Using this portal, VorTech can produce simulations that would typically take weeks to create in a matter of hours. VorTech powers these simulations using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C6gn Instances, which deliver high price performance for compute-intensive workloads. For a given simulation, VorTech will use between 32 and 96 cores to achieve optimal processing speeds. “Amazon EC2 C6gn Instances have given us a good balance of cost per core hour with maintaining the processing speeds that we need,” says Mannion.

VorTech has the option to archive its simulations locally or by using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a cloud object storage built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. CADFEM also uses Amazon S3 for postprocessing logs. To connect the company’s applications through Message Passing Interfaces, VorTech uses Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)—a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances—to run HPC and machine learning applications at scale. “The cloud-native customer portal developed by CADFEM is straightforward,” says Mannion. “It provides us with a mature, fully fledged system that we can access on demand when needed.”

Compared with physical prototyping, VorTech can save a significant amount of time and resources by running its simulations in the cloud. On one project, VorTech helped the customer save an estimated £96,000 annually, which represented a 39 percent savings compared with its previous baseline costs. The same customer also saw a 41 percent reduction in total energy usage compared with other facilities it owns. VorTech’s customers can benefit from predictive maintenance insights along with high-quality materials that extend the longevity of traditional plants. “By introducing our products to the industry, we’re promoting sustainability by offering energy savings, reducing maintenance and replacement costs, and maximizing the life span of our customers’ assets,” says Mulligan.