Wayne Patterson, the Chief Executive Officer of MultiTrode, is selected as the Chairman of Australian Institute of Management Queensland and Northern Territory for the period 2009-2010 after its Annual General Meeting in May 2009.

The AIM Qld & NT, founded in 1950, is a not for profit entity promoting the advancement of education and learning in the areas of management and leadership for commerce, industry and government. AIM provides training and conducts seminars on the latest industry trends in corporate management and helps professionals in developing their leadership qualities.

The AIM Qld & NT Board of Directors are chosen by the Professional Members of the Institute, once every two years. By electing Mr Patterson as the new Chairman, the AIM members recognised his more than 20 years experience in building successful businesses.

Mr Patterson, previously the Deputy Chairman of AIM, said

 There is no better time for leaders to partner with an innovative business like AIM. My responsibility as Chairman is to make sure we continue to position the Institute as a respected voice for leadership and management excellence.

Read more…

General News

 

MultiTrode has recently released the firmware version 2.2.1 for the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager. This update includes enhancements for achieving higher efficiencies and support for extra security.

Major highlights of this release are,

1) Easy interfacing of selected ABB drives, in just a few button presses
2) Support for Dallas iButton security key
3) Improvised well mixer functionality
4) New Pump Alternation Modes
5) Simplicity in interfacing Rain-gauges
6) Extended pump efficiency calculations and alarming
7) DNP Object 0 support (helps in remote identification of device details and DNP profiles)
8) Improvised VFD configuration menu
9) Enhancements for flow calculations and flow statistics

These new features and enhancements further extend the capabilities of the MultiSmart to continue providing a unique and one stop solution for Pump Station Management. Registered members can download the firmware from the MultiTrode website www.multitrode.com. If you do not have a login, please navigate to http://www.multitrode.com/member-registration.php for applying a free registration. Read more…

General News, Industry, SCADA & Telemetry

 

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.

 

Read more…

General News, Industry, Technical Notes Lift Station Optimization, Pump Controller Optimization, Pump Station Optimization

MultiSmart Pump Station Manager, with firmware version 2.2.0 onwards, now includes support for easy interfacing of the ABB ACS550 and ACS800 series VFDs. After a study in the US and UK, it was found that the ABB VFD’s are widely used in Pump Station Controls.

 

 

Having support for the MODBUS RTU capability MultiSmart can be interfaced to any VFD’s with MODBUS support for bringing the data in and to send controls to the drives, and these data can be easily brought to a SCADA system. This process is fairly easy and straight forward with the help of the buttons on the MultiSmart faceplate. The only time consuming part is adding the MODBUS points by going through the VFD data sheet.

However, after identifying the customer demands, this integration process is further simplified for selected ABB VFD’s in MultiSmart firmware version 2.2.0, which requires only a few button press. With this feature MultiSmart can now use the currents read from the VFD, instead of current read from the MultiSmart Motor Protection module, for generating the fault alarms.

Even though MultiSmart has the capability to stop the pumps based on faults, these faults are configured only to alarm due to the fact that the VFD will holdout the pumps from running. The relevant motor protection faults, when interfaced to these VFDs, are set to Auto Reset within MultSmart to avoid the need for two resets when the fault is cleared, thereby simplifying the steps involved with the operations.

The MODBUS communication can be either setup over a RS232 or over ethernet. A RS232 to 485 converter is required if the RS232 option is selected. Ethernet communication can be setup using a cross over cable or using a straight through ethernet cable with the help of an ethernet switch.

Read more…

General News, Technical Notes ABB, ACS550, ACS800, MultiSmart

This station is one of the four major stations in Greenwich, CT USA.  It pumps directly into the force main and sees an inflow of about 500 GPM into its very small well. If you would like to see video of the inflow into the well send me an email. If the station were to go down there will almost certainly be an overflow because they have only 20 minutes to respond. The station is equipped with a 2 VFD’s , backup generator,  mixer and a grinder.

The PLC operating the station used PID to keep a constant level in the well but the alternation feature did not work so someone would visit the station everyday to alternate the lead pump via the touch panel. The station used to have a an indicator panel separate from the PLC display that indicated what alarms were present. All three components (PLC, touch panel, indicator) were removed and only a MSU3MP took their place. One of the main reasons the town wanted to undertake the replacement of the PLC’s is the maintenance cost of the PLC programming. Most municipalities outsource the PLC programming. The MultiSmart has enabled them to get rid of the maintenance cost while adding the many features of the MultiSmart into the station.

 

It took 4 hours to get the station running on the Colacino Demo unit and 4 days to complete the retrofit. This relatively small demo unit is used by Colacino for retrofits and for MultiSmart demos. It has 30 ft cables coming out of it that were temporarily wired into the panel to keep the station running while the work was performed.

 

 

Read more…

General News colacino, greenwich, MultiSmart

 

In the recent past a few customer enquiries came regarding the capability of MultiSmart to act as a DNP gateway RTU in addition to its standard pump station / lift station management functionality. MultiSmart can certainly act as a RTU gateway along with its normal functionality; however, it has certain memory constraints which limit the number of DNP slave profiles it can support within the gateway.

 

To come up with an alternate solution we decided to trial the Linux based MultiTrode applications for the communication on an Embedded PC. A small form factor MOXA V481-XPE is selected for the testing and implementation. The MOXA V481 is a compact, DIN – rail mountable, industrial embedded PC with relatively good hardware resources. The additional advantage with this MOXA PC is that it has got 8 built in serial ports (all can be configured for RS-232/422/485) and 2 GBit Ethernet ports which ease the physical communication interfacing. Having a large number of physical communication ports the V481 is an ideal choice for implementing the MutiTrode RTU applications. It also has a large capacity hard disk built in so that MultiTrode historian (MySQL Database) can also be installed to save the historical data at the gateway as well.

 

Installation of CentOS was performed using a USB disk rather than the conventional ways since the V481 does not have a CD/DVD drive. Unetbootin-windows or Unetbootin-linux software is used to copy the Linux ISO image to the USB and to make the USB disk bootable with the installation launcher. Once the installation is complete I had to compile the serial port drivers and update Linux boot scripts to load these drivers every time when the system reboots. Now the base platform for the gateway system is ready. Setup and configuration of the MultiTrode DNP applications seems to be very easy on the embedded computer.

 

In the MOXA system, having 8 Serial ports and 2 Ethernet ports, we tested running 10 DNP masters one for each physical communication ports, at the same time successfully. The V481 system is shown in the figure below.

 

 

 

In addition to the data concentrator functionality, this setup has another major feature. ISaGRAF, an IEC61131-3 based PLC platform is part of the MultiTrode applications installed and hence you can implement custom PLC based applications and control logics within the gateway system.

 

You can also run a MODBUS gateway RTU which is already a part of the MultiTrode application pack installed. The MOXA embedded computer with the MultiTrode application can act as a DNP gateway RTU, MODBUS gateway RTU and perform PLC control logics simultaneously. Only constraint is that different communication protocols cannot utilize the same physical communication port. Read more…

Technical Notes

  

 

We have been receiving a lot of enquiries regarding the Redundant Communication capability of the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager recently. Each of these customers has different configurations for their redundant communication network.

 

MultiSmart has support for DNP3 and MODBUS protocols which are widely in use in the Water and Wastewater Industries across the globe. MultiSmart has three serial (RS232) ports and an Ethernet (RJ45) port. Hence we can interface MultiSmart to multiple Serial communication devices as well to an Ethernet switch or router at the same time. Having capability to support multiple DNP and/or MODBUS Master and/or Slaves within the same unit, we can see that MultiSmart can be setup to talk with more than one Master Terminal Unit (MTU) at the same time over different communication channels.

 

To demonstrate these, we have created four different DNP3 configurations which consist of different combinations of the physical communication channel as listed below.

 

1)                 TCP/IP as Primary and two Radios as Backup.

2)                 Radio as Primary and another Radio and TCP/IP as Backup.

3)                 TCP/IP as Primary and PSTN as Backup

4)                 Radio as Primary and PSTN as Backup

 

To achieve channel switching, according to the desired order when communication over a particular channel fails, we have written four simple ISaGRAF PLC programs, one for each configuration. More explanation on ISaGRAF is given towards the end of this blog.

 

To achieve redundancy over TCP/IP as well as with backup Radios, we have created three DNP slaves within the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager, all having the same slave profiles. The first DNP slave is setup to talk through the Ethernet port, while the second and third DNP slaves were configured to talk through serial ports 2 and 3 respectively. Unsolicited responses are enabled on the TCP/IP channel when the communication begins.

 

In the event of a communication failure over the TCP/IP channel, the ISaGRAF program changes the IP address of the Master Station to which it is talking with the new IP address of the Backup Master Station. If that also fails, then the unit will try communication over first Radio and will eventually try the second Radio if no response is heard through the first one.

 

This shows the flexibility which MultiSmart has, so as to meet custom redundant communication networks. The ISaGRAF program can be written to satisfy the communication channel switching, IP address switching, PSTN telephone number switching, DNP Unsolicited response channel switching etc on the fly without a restart of the MultiSmart unit. A part of the ISaGRAF program function block diagram is shown in the figure below.

 

 

The importance of historical data which is vital for adaptive controls and its applicability in preventive maintenance is known to more and more people in the recent past. Redundant communication plays an essential role in bringing all the information from the field equipments without any loss of data.

 

The MultiSmart Pump Station Manager was able to  satisfy the Redundant Communication requirements of the customers along with meeting their Lift Station management specifications.

 

Brief Overview of MultiSmart’s PLC extension, ISaGRAF

 

ISAGRAF is a control software environment which supports all of the internationally recognized IEC61131-3 control languages and offers a combination of highly portable and robust control engine. Support for the latest release, version 5, of the ISaGRAF is available in MultiSmart.

 

This PLC extension of MultiSmart allows system integrators and end-users to further enhance or adapt the capability of MultiSmart.  The product has enormous amount functionalities built in, but there are always customers or applications that push the envelope.  The product has 1000s of tags, and System Integrator’s or End-Users can now interface to these with the PLC engine.  This means they can extend the capability without having to rewrite existing functions.

 

The ISaGRAF implementation of IEC61131-3 is added because it is the most proven platform and v5 is chosen as it offers a number of advantages over v3.  One example is the ability in v5 to run different ‘resources’, or applications, at different rates to allow more critical applications to run more frequently.

 

 

Read more…

Technical Notes

 

Recently, we have received a purchase order from a customer regarding a lift station (pump station) application for odor reduction for their sewage treatment plant. The sewage pit, as you all might know, fills up very quick during the morning as well as in the evening and is very slow during the late nights. For odor control the customers are dosing SulfaLock into the waste water pit depending on the flow rate. After observation of the pit for a few weeks the customers came up with a diurnal curve, which is to be followed to control the dosing. They also wanted the ability to change the data values for the diurnal curve, as and when the statistical data corresponding to the flow in the sewage pit in a day changes.

 

The diurnal curve is shown in the figure below. The output rate required is plotted against the time of the day in minutes.

  

  

This unique RTU application requires custom programming which can become quite cumbersome when having to start from scratch. MultiSmart, having most advanced pump station management technology and the PLC extension built in, made this custom application development look very simple. With support for DNP and MODBUS communication, which are the popular communication protocols used in Water and Waste Water Treatment Telemetry, and the integrated 1000 plus tags related to Pump Station Management statistics it was extremely easy to configure the communication.

Read more…

Technical Notes flow matching, isagraf, odor control, plc