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