Pump Station Optimization – easy to achieve with MultiSmart
Pump Station performance optimization has become an important feature for pump stations throughout the world. A well optimized pump station can increase the lifetime of the pumps as well as decrease the cost involved in running the station. Station optimization can also help in reducing the hardware, software and maintenance costs significantly.
However it has been seen that many a times the pump stations (or lift stations) are not designed or maintained close to the best possible solution. Design changes after the Pump Station commissioning for including optimizations features are commonly seen these days.
Majority of the reasons behind this are; inability to identify all the optimization parameters during the design and commissioning phase; huge costs and time constraints involved with the software reprogramming (PLC programming and SCADA changes) which are quite often seen requiring vast changes; incapability to see the relevant historical data required for achieving optimization; inability to trial different combinations of optimization features; and changing demands to the station due to geographical & environmental changes, increase in population leading to varying optimization design requirements.
The MultiSmart Pump Station Manager is designed to eliminate these optimization issues. With the help of the easy to configure parameters through the LCD faceplate the user can configure different optimization settings and combinations. Having more than 500 tags for a standard two pump controller MultiSmart configuration the station’s functioning, with the relevant data, can be easily trended and observed over a period of time for fine tuning. The trending can be viewed from a SCADA system, as well as using the built-in Data Logging feature of the MultiSmart. The license free TrendReporter software, available for download at the MultiTrode website (www.multitrode.com), can be used to view the trends from the data logged within the MultiSmart unit.
Tags with the relevant data can be added for local or remote data logging, or deleted when not required, by browsing through the tag list in the LCD faceplate and selecting a few options. The tag database in the unit has about 3000 entries which covers all of the station optimization and pump control data available.
The MultiSmart unit comes with a lot Optimization features built into the software. The users can enable or disable particular features and setup & change the parameters according to the requirements with a few button presses. Therefore these features can easily be trialed after the station commissioning or whenever new changes are required and the best solution can thus be identified and implemented.
Available ready to use optimization features are as follows,
- Odor reduction (Max Off Time)
- Max Run Time
- Station Max Pumps to Run
- Minimize Fat Buildup
- Well Clean Out
- Minimize Excessive Starts
- High Inflow
- Well Washer
- Well Mixer
- Blocked Pump Detection
- Pump Max Starts Per Hour
The most common settings are found in the main station optimization screen. New custom configurations can also be created easily without needing any hardware or firmware changes. The pump controller functionality has a whole range of advanced pump station parameters and can support multiple wells, multiple groups of pumps and multiple profiles.
A variety of standard pump alternation schemes are also present in the MultiSmart which are listed below.
- Alternation (std)
- Fixed (std)
- Alternation Special
- Fixed Strict
- Hours Run
- Pump Starts
- Efficiency
- N to 1
- First On First Off
Alternation by efficiency is one of the popular features utilized by the MultiSmart customers.
We have seen that the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager can improve the performance of a station immensely with the help of the standard and configurable optimization features. We can look at each of these features and how the customers are benefiting from them in the coming posts.
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