The spin-off from the School of Civil Engineers at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Hidralab, is one of the companies participating in the consortium which is developing the project for modernizing the water supply network for the Vietnamese city of Ho Chi Minh, formerly known as Saigon. Hidralab, which has emerged from the Water Engineering Group from the Civil Engineering School and whose managing director, Javier Gonzalez Perez, is a professor at the university, is dedicated to developing innovative solutions to improving management of such an essential and limited resource as water and has developed intelligent hydraulic tools to manage infrastructures.

The project, funded by the Asian Bank of Development is contemplating improving the operating efficiency of a highly complex network, which supplies over ten million people, by means of setting up information and communication technologies to know the state of the network in real time and to enable decisions to be taken safely and effectively. At present , the water supply network for the Ho Chi Minh metropolitan area has various problems relating to water pressure, water quality and a high level of water produced but not billed for which the leading international project, in which Hidralab is participating, seeks to reduce.

The work of Hidralab in this project focuses on studying the water network, the current means of running it, recommendations for future management and designing monitoring systems which enable necessary information to be available in real time for improving how it is run and the service provided to citizens. At the same time, the UCLM spin-off provides highly innovative technology for optimizing ICT tools used for managing networks which have been applied to other large networks such as the network of Canal de Isabel II, the public company responsible for supplying drinking water in the Community of Madrid. The equipment proposed by Hidralab for installation in the future water supply network for Ho Chi Minh will be supplied by another member of the Hispano-Vietnamese consortium, ABB, a high standing international company, dedicated to manufacturing electronic instrumentation for measurement and control equipment.

The Hidralab spin-off develops technological solutions which enable traditional water distribution networks to be transformed into intelligent networks, in a modernization process which will become more widespread in the years to come for distribution systems as a whole. Transformation does nor just include real time monitoring of variables measured on the network, but developing intelligent hydraulic tools which process all information received and translate it into recommendations to administrators to improve efficiency in water management.

UCLM Communication Office Ciudad Real, 26th of February, 2018.