How old is America’s wastewater infrastructure?

Much of the country’s infrastructure was built in the 30 years after World War II. Although age is a key indicator of a system’s health, equally important is the way the system has been maintained. A well-maintained system can operate effectively for a significant period of time.

All products have a life cycle – the clothes you wear, the desk you’re working on, the chair you’re sitting in – everything. The same is true for the nation’s infrastructure, and each of its components:

Components & Life Cycles

Collections: 80-100 Years

Treatment Plants (Concrete Structure): 50 Years

Treatment Plant Mechanical/Electrical Equipment: 15-20 Years

Force Mains: 25 Years

Pump Stations (Concrete Structure): 50 Years

Pump Stations (Mechanical/Electrical Equipment): 15 Years

Interceptors: 90-100 Years

What is the state of the Union?

Among the many challenges facing our water and wastewater systems are:

• Large Capital Investment
• Aging Workforce
• Lack of New Skilled Workers Entering the Marketplace
• Increased Regulation
• Disengaged Public
• Interdependence on the Energy Sector

Estimates of national investment needs range from $300 Billion to $2 Trillion over the next 20 years.

Today’s population is benefiting from the investments made by past generations. Looking forward, the EPA is promoting practices that encourage utilities to address existing needs so that future generations will not be left to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure. This is referred to as “Sustainable Infrastructure”.

The Four Pillars of Sustainable Infrastructure are better management, efficient water use, full-cost pricing of water and a watershed approach to protection. The EPA believes this will help utilities to operate more sustainably now and in the future.

MultiTrode Can Help!

Our technologically advanced products have been developed with system efficiency and easy interface in mind. With the push of a button, our smart pump controllers will help you:

• Promote effective utility management
• Minimize operations cost
• Facilitate effective asset management
• Improve maintenance and capital investment planning
• Reduce energy cost & CO2 emissions
• Increase system-wide efficiency

Learn more about the innovative Level Sensing Probe and intuitive MultiSmart Pump Station Manager. Read more…

Industry efficiency, environmental, Level Sensing, MultiSmart, probe, Pump Controller

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.

ABB - ACS800 Drive

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

The Blue Ocean Strategy is a great book by Kim and Mauborgne (Harvard Press) that looks at how exciting new  products can be created at the development stage by focusing on uncontested market space.

In the book the authors argue that instead of companies trying to be better than the competitors and fighting over market share they should instead focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested Blue Ocean market places where new demands of customers are satisfied.  Rather than trying to beat the competition at their own game businesses looking for uncontested space should answer four questions:

• Which of the factors that our industry takes for granted should be eliminated?
• Which factors should be reduced well below the industry’s standard?
• Which factors should be raised well above the industry’s standard?
• Which factors should be created that the industry never offered?

I found the book a good read and like anyone who learns about a new model or concept I wanted to try it out on one of our products at home.  I knew that no-one here had read the book before designing the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager over five years ago so it would be a good test. I am now sitting down and will do my best to answer the four questions:

• What did we eliminate that the industry took for granted?
That is easy. We took away the need to bring in a third party expert to set up, commission or make changes to the configuration of pump control in a lift station. It was all made so easy to use that any operator could be given simple training to do it and save themselves big dollars!

• What factor did we reduce below the industry standard? 
After thinking about that for a while it occurs to me that the MultiSmart reduces the number of moving parts found in any panel or station control box. The standard control panel is full of gear. A MultiSmart takes a lot of that away – up to 14 different devices are eliminated from one panel, maybe more. Again – big savings.

• Which factors did the MultiSmart raise well above the industry standard?
One of the biggest issues for the industry is getting enough data from lift stations and pump station. On average the industry is used to controllers providing less than 50 tags. We saw that as being the big picture for customers. The more information you have to hand the better your decision making. Asset managers are becoming more focused on network management, efficiency, energy and operating costs. Information and lots of it was going to be the key. We upped the ante with the MultiSmart and brought back 500 tags of data (and growing).  This allows greater level of control and monitoring than ever offered before in a controller.

• Which factor did we create that had not been offered before? 
Going back to the book for examples the authors showed how Cirque Du Soleil had solved this by being the first to offer a high level of theatre to their industry (Circus entertainment). That leads me to say that the MultiSmart was the first to offer an out-of –the-box solution for full pump station management. All the hard work has been done for you.  All the smarts come with the unit and we provide free upgrades as we develop them.

You might agree with me on those answers or you might not. My view is that they stand up to some scrutiny but I would love to hear if anyone has a different view. Read more…

General News, Industry MultiSmart, Pump Controller, Pump Station Management

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.

Greenwich South Panel before installing MultiSmart

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.

Greenwich South Panel: removed components

Colacino demo unit

Greenwich South Water panel after installing MultiSmart

General News colacino, greenwich, MultiSmart

v2.1 of MultiSmart firmware is now on the website. Take a look at the recent post to find out what is included in this release.

The firmware can be downloaded if you have been given access to the firmware area. Create a login on the main site and request MultiSmart firmware (one of the checkboxes). If you already have a login, click on “Edit my details” in the top right of the main site. Read more…

General News dnp3 security, MultiSmart, PID

v2.1 of the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager will be released in the next week or two. There’s some great new features included as well as lots of small enhancements and cosmetic upgrades:

• PID control, e.g. for constant pressure, constant flow via IsaGRAF
• New comms screen making all the communications much easier to setup
• Smart Outflow calculation to cater for high inflow conditions
• Updated DNP3 security (v2)
• Time to spill calculation on the main screen
• Generator functionality (e.g., run time and starts)

More about these features in later posts.

What else is in v2.1?

Fault finding tool – you can enable DNP3 and Modbus logging on the unit, then view the log on the LCD. We’ll do a post later which shows more about how this works in practice and why it’s useful.

Pump Running by External Control – the display shows when the over-ride is running the pumps (known via contactor auxiliary or currents). The main screen shows External Run next to that pump. And the starts and hours run accumulators also update. Thanks to Todd Burnett from Coastal Process & Steve Lahm from North East Water for requesting it (and maybe others as well).

DOUT from multiple sources – you can already do with this with IsaGRAF or the logic engine, but a few customers requested being able to configure a DOUT from a number of sources without using custom logic. So the user interface lets you choose a number of sources and select the “operator” – AND, OR, XOR.

Station Outflow alarm – there are already flow alarms by pump, this has been introduced to cover the complete station.

Cosmetic improvement - holding down a softkey repeats the keypress – greatly welcomed by anyone who has configured lots of faults and digital inputs for example.

Upgrading – the DSP upgrade is automatic, so you don’t have to remember to do that after a firmware upgrade. And when you put in a CF card with an upgrade image the unit prompts you to do an update.

Extra IO blocks in LCD – the Acromag and Adam IO units weren’t fully integrated into the LCD but now have been. Previously the available IO from external units didn’t show up in some of the settings screens (only in the advanced screens), but now do.

Custom names for IsaGRAF tags – the user can rename any IsaGRAF tag as well as change values, making the process a lot more intuitive. Read more…

General News MultiSmart

We posted a news item on our main site about Trihedral and MultiTrode.

Background

This brief blog post gives a bit of background. Canadian-based Trihedral have been making inroads into the water and wastewater industry – our main market – for some time. From our perspective, we have seen them win a lot of customers in the SE of the USA. They might be winning customers in lots of other areas too.. we’ve just noticed the SE region.

The Florida market has had a major supplier who locked up the customer base with a proprietary protocol. What Trihedral did was reverse engineer the protocol. As a result, the Trihedral VTS platform can be implemented by these customers who can continue to use their existing field hardware but are now free of their restraints! They change their SCADA platform, keep their old hardware (so don’t have to change everything overnight), but they can start using new products.

These customers who have switched to VTS can now introduce any product they want in the field – or the plant – so long as it supports open protocols like Modbus or DNP3. 

The Partnership

That’s the background, but the news item is about what Trihedral have done, in partnership with MultiTrode. VTS will shortly have an “add site” function for MultiSmart.

This function essentially removes a lot of the legwork, or integration, out of bringing a MultiSmart site with 100’s of tags (data points) into the VTS system.

The new version of VTS isn’t quite out yet – expected in February. But I saw a demo of it a few months ago and was very impressed. The MultiSmart pump station manager was on an ethernet link (could have been a radio link) to the VTS SCADA server and the whole process was automated.

The remote MultiSmart site created a compressed version of the XML configuration (we use XML as standard for all configuration files), transmitted it using DNP file transfer (industry standard), VTS loaded it, unzipped it, and presented the user with a few checkbox options for configuration – including graphics, alarms and controls.

I know some of the Florida customers are very keen to get their hands on it. And some of our engineers are very interested in what Trihedral have done.

2+2 is more than 4 – if you choose the right combination

That’s the beauty of working with other companies who are great at what they do and have a passion for making things better! New ideas that spur our engineers on to come up with even more innovation.. and make life easier for the customer. Read more…

SCADA & Telemetry Add new tag, DNP3, MultiSmart, SCADA, telemetry

This follows on from the first blog post on DNP3 where we covered Date/Time Stamping – or Less Guessing - and a little bit of a comparison with Modbus.

This post is about some of the mechanisms for communicating between the SCADA, or master station, and the remote site. By the way, in DNP3 speak, you often hear the term “outstation” for the remote site. We’ll tend to stay with RTU (depending on who you talk to it either means “Remote Telemetry Unit” or “Remote Terminal Unit”), which is essentially the device that communicates.

Polling 

Let’s start with a Modbus comparison again, just to give a little context. Modbus is a totally polled environment – that is, the master station (typically a PLC) requests data from a site. The remote site can’t choose to send some data to the master station, it has to wait until the master requests it. So a very typical arrangement for a collection system is where the master PLC polls each lift station in turn and when it is has finished, starts again.

This has a lot of disadvantages as anyone with a growing network of lift stations has found. The time taken to get around the network goes up and up. You might get to a point where it’s 15 minutes between polls and decide to prioritize certain sites to get polled more frequently, or add a radio frequency (and therefore a new base station and repeater radio) to split the network into more manageable pieces.

It’s not an ideal situation, because Modbus isn’t an ideal telemetry protocol. (It’s a great protocol for other applications).

Unsolicited Reporting

If waiting until the master station asks you how you are doing isn’t the best way, what about unsolicited reporting. What’s unsolicited reporting? The remote site, also known as the RTU, sends data to the master station without being asked.

If you are used to Modbus polling systems, this might sound like anarchy. And if you have every site sending a message every time an event takes place, it could well be anarchy. Will the radio network stand up to lots of sites all trying to communicate at once?

The only way you might be able to prevent chaos, is by having a very limited amount of data getting sent, or a high radio bandwidth. One of the guys in MultiTrode told me about a system he was involved in with a previous company where they used unsolicited reporting for every event, and during a major storm the entire network shut down due to “collisions” in the radio network. The solution was for someone to go and visit every site and reset each RTU. Then the network started communicating again. But they lost all the data for their critical event.

That’s not great. What’s the solution?

Communication Choices and Different Classes

The DNP3 protocol has some great features to avoid the problems above.

Firstly, you can group events into different classes. Then secondly, you can choose how those different classes communicate from the RTU to the master station.

An example is the best way to explain it. Suppose you want to know about all high level alarms within 1 minute, and otherwise you are happy for all stations to be communicating at least once every 30 minutes.

You would put the alarm “High level” into class 1, and everything else into class 2. Then you would set class 1 to unsolicited reporting immediately. And class 2 you might set one of two ways – either to report every 30 minutes or sooner if the event buffer was full; or you might have the master station polling every 30 minutes.

Now you can find out immediately about high level alarms without risking the network turning into treacle and you still find out about all the changes in your network.

It’s the flexibility in DNP3 that is one of its great features. As Paul Gibson, one of the key people behind the development of the MultiSmart pump station manager, said:

“If we didn’t have DNP3, we’d be trying to design a protocol just like it to put into the product.”

The Communications Network still needs Design

Just because there’s a flexible protocol doesn’t mean you don’t have to do anything. Every communications network needs design. How much data? What is the bandwidth? What are the delays?

Read more…

SCADA & Telemetry DNP3, Modbus, MultiSmart, RTU, SCADA, telemetry