Water and wastewater leaders are unsung heroes. Clean, safe water is essential to human life and to the well-being of the environment, yet it is grossly underfunded. Limited resources lead to deferred maintenance and difficult decisions.
Water utilities face many challenges including aging infrastructure, constrained resources and revenue shortfalls. Most utilities use various technological resources to manage their assets and increase efficiency. Resources may include Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), hydraulic models, asset management systems, network sensors, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and billing databases. Unfortunately, those resources are often managed in “silos.”
The Internet continues to transform the way business is done, industries are in transition, new markets are opening, and consumer habits are shifting. Even if your architecture is working well now, is it scalable enough to adapt to unpredictable changes?
One afternoon at a waste water treatment facility, an alarm goes off when the water pressure gets too high in one of the tanks. The alarm is set at priority level 4, which means “critical,” but it doesn’t stand out because almost every other alarm at the facility is set at that level. Besides, the operator can’t acknowledge it right away because he’s dealing with several other alarms that went off a few minutes earlier – which he doesn’t yet realize are just “nuisance alarms.”
When it comes time to update, it's a prime opportunity to consider switching over to new software that offers improved functionality instead of dumping more money into just keeping your existing software up-to-date.
Have you ever been trapped in “development hell”? If you’ve been involved in developing software applications, you can probably relate to the feeling. Modern technologies offer many promising possibilities for your enterprise, but the actual process of development can feel endless and painful, especially for control engineers or other professionals who may not have extensive training in software development. In this white paper, learn about the development platform.
Western Municipal Water District replaced their full SCADA system using Ignition.
In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, 1,200 kilometers northeast of Perth, Roy Hill Iron Ore (Roy Hill) is developing an open pit, bulk mining facility capable of processing 55 megatons of iron ore annually. Set to be the country’s largest iron ore mining operation, the AUD 10 billion project includes a water supply and dewatering network spanning 300 square kilometers that needs continuous adapting to meet the changing mining and ore processing requirements over the 20-year life of the mine (LOM).
The engineers at a municipal wastewater treatment utility were expanding their biogas digester system and were seeking an improvement over their existing, maintenance-intensive flow metering technology. They needed to measure the amount of gas contained within a gas bag as well as the flow rate of the gases traveling from the gas bag system into a co-generation power system.
Privatization of the United Kingdom’s (UK) water industry 25 years ago required providers to implement asset management programs (AMP) whereby water boards tendered contracts to construction firms to update the industry’s antiquated assets and help keep infrastructure properly maintained.
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