City Of Lynchburg Wastewater Treatment Plant Implements Bedrock For Simplicity, Scalability And Security

Bedrock Automation announced recently that the City of Lynchburg, Virginia has selected the Bedrock control system for its wastewater treatment operations. The City implemented Bedrock to control both de-chlorination and storm water remediation operations, and is planning other integration and control applications as part of its ongoing modernization program. Systems integration firm Instrulogic of North Carolina provided programming support to help deploy and integrate the system with the City’s Inductive Automation Ignition SCADA HMI network.

“We want to transform from a centralized to a distributed approach using edge controller capabilities. Bedrock enables us to use remote monitoring, bringing many devices online into our SCADA system for the first time,” said Jason Hamlin, SCADA Manager, City of Lynchburg.

The Lynchburg Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant treats an average of 13 million gallons a day for Lynchburg and surrounding communities. The first two phases of its modernization initiative include automation of the residual chlorine removal process and the mitigation and notification of storm water overflows. The Bedrock platform supplied Lynchburg with an affordable alternative for transforming a complex, aging, and connectivity-challenged de-chlorination system.  It also proved the most rapid and cost-effective approach to address their storm water collection and alert-compliance issues.

“Providing public access to the existing scanner/alarm in the current environment meant opening access to the SCADA system, which we could not do. Bedrock’s cyber security allows us to confidently monitor overflows and feed data to the Ignition SCADA system, while providing public notifications,” said Hamlin.

According to Hamlin, a key to Bedrock’s flexibility is its modern and free Integrated Development Platform (IDE). The ability to switch over to Bedrock without interrupting treatment operations is facilitated by the embedded simulation capabilities that ensure a solution is fully tested before deployment.

Lynchburg continues to find new opportunities to leverage Bedrock’s breadth of capabilities. The team is currently evaluating a request to connect the Ignition SCADA system to the city’s business network for secure administrative and reporting, and the Bedrock system would simplify data collection.

“I could probably run the whole plant with one controller if I wanted to. I can also monitor much more than with my previous vendor, across multiple protocols and with no additional system cost,” said Hamlin.

About Bedrock Automation
Bedrock Automation, based in San Jose, California, is the maker of Bedrock, the world’s most powerful and cyber secure automation platform. This Silicon Valley company has assembled the latest technologies and talents from both the automation and semiconductor industries to build an unprecedented automation solution for industrial control based on three prime directives: simplicity, scalability and security. The result is a system with a revolutionary electromagnetic backplane architecture and deeply embedded ICS cyber security, which delivers the highest levels of system performance, industrial cyber security and reliability at the lowest cost of ownership. For more information, visit www.bedrockautomation.com.