We are involved with a number of organizations, both large and small. We provide contributions at two levels; engineering and management. Engineering projects range from drives towards system efficiency, product development and validation, project management and system design.
Management-based projects look towards strategy implementation, organizational reviews and business start-up. The list of projects below, whilst not exhaustive, does show our diversity in areas of support.
Apparent Water Loss consultancy awarded by the local water authority.
Small Business Start Up consultancies with clients provided by Malta Enterprise.
Real Water Loss consultants to the Malta water and energy regulator.
Team Leaders to the International Water Association (IWA) Apparent Water Loss task force.
Training in water loss control for local institutions, IWA and non-local networks.
Product Development and Validation for a local development company.
Formulation and Implementation on new electrical regulations with the local standards Authority.
Process re-engineering for a foreign Tier 1 automotive company.
General management & efficiency consultants and trainers.
Grounded theory research focusing on small firm strategic behaviour in Malta. Results confirmed the predominance of five trajectories, or pathways, of small business strategic behaviour, each passing through a sequence of distinct life cycle states. For each pathway a unique performance situation was observed, resulting from the dynamic coalignment of the owner-manager’s entrepreneurial philosophy, the competitive behaviour adopted by the firm, and the competitive environment to the firm. Understanding which strategic pathway a small firm belongs to allows for a comprehensive insight into the firm’s competitive behaviour, and a prediction of the consequences to that behaviour.
This national project consisted of controlling water pressures in the Maltese Islands. Two complementary techniques were applied over a 10-year period, from 1995 to 2005. These were: stand-alone automated pressure control via electronically controlled PRV’s; and variable speed pump control. The techniques helped to reduce leakage in the Maltese Islands from an ILI of 10 to an ILI of below 3.
This national project consisted of zoning the Maltese Islands into over 300 hydraulically defined zones and the ‘geocoding’ of all consumer references onto a point on a GIS map. The GIS tool was so developed to allow both top-down and bottom-up computations of real and apparent water losses, for all 300 zones.
The study is an ongoing research project with the University of Malta. Research is underway to analyze the signals induced by leakage as the water creates vibrations as it exits through the crack or hole. The problem is particularly severe where there are cases of water logging, in which case both the frequency and amplitude of the leakage signal becomes severely reduced and difficult to detect.
This national project included the application of Automated Meter Reading (AMR) in the Islands of Malta and Gozo. In Gozo, AMR was applied to include remote metering via low-power radio modules. The project was particularly useful to assist in Apparent Water Loss studies, allowing for quick calculations of apparent losses and an easier analysis of potential solutions.
This study took place with the collaboration of the University of Catania. Leakage was studied via non-intrusive thermal imagery, by scanning the ground above existing water mains. The project allowed the researchers to compare the advantages and disadvantages of thermal infra-red imagery with more conventional leakage location techniques such as correlation and acoustic noise logging.
