
“Never settle with possible”
CTO
Markus Sunela
Our company, Fluidit Ltd., wants to have a positive, lasting effect on improving the ecological and economic efficiency, safety and reliability of urban hydraulic networks.
Who says analyzing and designing utility networks and their equipment must be tedious, labour-intensive or static?
Our first priority is to make the lives of the engineers and managers using our software as fun and engaging as possible. The use of the software must be fluid – the software must not get into your way, it must help you every way it can (for example you can type expressions anywhere you can enter a number!), and it must enable the mass imports, exports and modifications of the model and scripting. In short – we make daily things a breeze, hard things easy and impossible possible.
We want to be able to exceed our clients’ expectations – whether they are utilities or engineering offices. An engineer should never have to say, that this or that cannot be done with the tools in his disposal. We listen to what you need. We do the research. We implement it. And you profit.
All our personnel have at least a Bachelor’s degree and 86 % at least a Master’s degree. Our position is quite unique, as all our personnel are very well versed specifically in hydraulic modeling and hydraulics, and everyone uses our software as a main daily tool in their engineering projects, and actively takes part in the development and in the support. Our developers are also experts in both hydromechanics and simulators, and modern software development methodologies. Thus, we understand deeply and can further develop the whole chain from physics, to simulators, to user interface and finally to analyzing the result and applying them in the daily utility operations.
Fluidit is actively engaged in research, development and innovating around modeling tools, model usage, model and result presentation, simulators and knowledge management – smart utilities and communities. The specific R&D topics arise from the clients’ needs, the projects we and our clients do, academic publications and conferences, and of our personnel’s interests.
The modeling software, while based on the open-source development versions of EPANET and EPASWMM simulators available from OpenWaterAnalytics project, incorporate a lot of our own developments to the simulators, such as pump batteries, possibility to develop complex control system code and so on. The biggest part of R&D, though, is based on the down-stream analysis of the simulation results.
Our CTO, Dr. Markus Sunela, works part-time as Post-Doctoral Researcher at Tampere University of Technology (TUT), where his research focuses on resilience and reliability of urban utility networks, smart utilities and simulator development. He teaches these topics and hydraulic modeling at TUT and also in Aalto University, together with our Planning Manager, MSc Mika Kuronen.
Our tools are in use in various universities around Finland and Estonia, such as aforementioned Tampere University of Technology, Aalto University and Tallinn University of Technology. We actively offer internships and thesis worker positions for the students, both to learn and develop new ourselves, but also to share our vision of hydraulic planning and development
Currently, we focus on online modeling and optimization, creation of new derivative modeling results, integrating modeling to network information systems, model predictive control, and resilience aspects of the networks. Visualizing the results and integrating the modeling both into the processes and the daily used software in the utilities go hand-in-hand with the online modeling efforts.
Markus Sunela
CTO
References

"Grundfos works together with Fluidit Ltd in Finland with water utilities to facilitate the best of both worlds – the modelling capabilities and the hardware in the water networks. For us, Fluidit delivers valuable insights and analytic skills together with a detailed understanding of the water networks. At the same time, Fluidit staff are highly skilled and very professional to work with."
Ole Hejn Pjengaard, Director, WU Business Development, GRUNDFOS Holding A/S

"We have been working with Fluidit in regards of analyzing water and wastewater networks. We are using their software and expertise on various design tasks and to gain information for operation. We want to make decisions based on knowledge, and that’s exactly what deep analysis of network systems provides us."
Irina Nordman, CEO, Turun Vesihuolto Ltd
"Fluidit Ltd. delivered free-to-use modelling software for water and wastewater networks to the students and researchers of Water and Environmental Engineering in Aalto University. In addition, their specialists teach our students with the software to understand the operation and behavior of water and wastewater systems. Fluidit Ltd. has actively been leading the whole water service industry into more intelligent direction with their research-oriented approach."
Professor Riku Vahala, Aalto University, Water and wastewater engineering

Mänttä multiutility services it’s customers with district heating, water and waste water services. Multiutility wanted state-of-the-art modelling software for all the distribution system types with common, easily approachable interface. They wanted to model their networks and gain deeper understanding of its functionality and improvement needs.

"Using Fluidit's model-based analysis of our water distribution system, we have been able to get an overall picture of our system's operation and have identified the most energy-efficient measures. We will continue to rely on their services through modeling, for example in contingency planning and in possible special circumstances."
Risto Bergbacka, CEO, Vesikolmio

Sitowise is a specialist consulting company with 1,300 personnel that provides its customers the full range of built environment services from planning to expert and digital services under the same roof. Fluidit Sewer and Fluidit Water software has enabled Sitowise to bring more detailed analysis with less amount of time to their utility and municipality customers.