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MultiTrode is a world leader in control systems with satisfied customers in thirty-five countries worldwide.

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MultiTrode continues to develop technically advanced products and systems. Our team of highly qualified Research & Development engineers designs and develops products that are focused on making the job easier for operations staff and municipal management in water and wastewater organizations throughout the world.

MultiTrode is continually working on product improvement and new product developments, responding to ideas and feedback from customers.

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Case on Point
The MultiSmart range of products is the result of a $5M development project and over 20 years of experience in control and monitoring technology for water and wastewater Pump Stations.

The MultiSmart Pump Station Manager incorporates an advanced lift station controller, a flexible and open RTU, a PLC, voltage, energy and current monitoring and other control panel components – all in one unit. Its intuitive interface for operators and engineers means no programming is required. Instead, station performance is adjusted by turning on features and changing parameters. 

v2.0 of Multismart was released in July 2008 and came with some major enhancements.

PLC functionality

IsaGRAF v5 was added in as an option to the product. This means that a full IEC61131-3 compliant PLC extension is available (all 5 languages).

How does it integrate and when is it needed?

First thing to mention is that the code behind MultiSmart is NOT written in a PLC language. It’s in C++ for a whole bunch of reasons that I hope to get our software team to elaborate on at a slightly later date.

What MultiSmart does do is make ALL of the many tags (1000’s) available to the PLC module for reading and writing. This then allows a PLC programmer to extend, change or add totally new modules, without having to rewrite the complete application or module from scratch.

Praveen wrote a post recently about a customer who wanted to match dosing of SulfaLock to the flow rate for odor control. It’s such a custom requirement that you wouldn’t expect to find it in the standard list of MultiSmart functions! So Praveen developed it for the customer in IsaGRAF. The customer or his SI could have done the same, so it’s not dependant on MultiTrode engineering staff writing the application. Of course, we like doing custom applications because it’s a great opportunity to learn more.

Another PLC application would be testing a high level alarm in a specific way – turning the pumps off periodically, letting the level rise, and ensuring the high level alarm actually operated. That’s a function that we might include as standard at some stage, but I’m sure you get the idea.

How might that work?  The PLC application would interface to the pump controller module - maybe based on date/time and certain other conditions being met (low flow rates, no pump alarms last 3 days), and turn the pumps off, then monitor the level to where the high level alarm should activate. If it does activate, start the pumps, send a “High level alarm check ok” signal to SCADA and reset the high level alarm. If it doesn’t activate, still start the pumps (!), send a “High level alarm FAIL” signal to SCADA and reset the high level alarm.

There is a lot of functionality in MultiSmart so a challenge for us is educating our customer base as to what’s there so someone doesn’t spend a week or two rewriting something we have already done and tested..

Another enhancement in v2 is to be able to view all tags on the LCD screen, including IsaGRAF tags and the entire tag database (go to the Info screen on MultiSmart) – makes on-site troubleshooting a lot easier!

DNP3 Security

The new standard for DNP3 security was out so we included it in MultiSmart v2. There’s a big concern about security in SCADA communications so we moved it to the top of our queue. You can find out more in this DNP3 Security post.

More Expandable I/O

We added some off the shelf I/O blocks and integrated them into the user interface. Why 3rd party I/O modules? Standard I/O is pretty much a commodity these days so there are plenty of great modules out there. We added two Adam units from Advantech, and in 2.01 added two UL-listed Acromag units. They connect on Ethernet using Modbus TCP protocol.

What we’ve done in MultiSmart I/O is focus on specific pump station requirements, so even though the most common I/O card you find in MultiSmart has 2x 4-20mA Analog inputs, 1x 4-20mA Analog output, 7 Digital outputs and 20 Digital inputs – there are some extras. The Digital inputs as default are volt-free contact closure inputs but can also be configured to read Flygt FLS, PTC thermistors, seal sensors, conductive probe inputs (for the MultiTrode probe), and a few can be configured to be Flygt CLS or high speed counters. The card also includes 3 inputs for reading phase-to-phase supply directly – up to 600v input.

And the energy and pump efficiency card reads 3-phase currents, and provides insulation resistance. Reading all this I/O usually means you have to buy lots of parts to do the signal conditioning. So most people don’t do it and spend lots of time driving to site to see what’s going on..

All of these pump station specific I/O makes the control panel, simpler, more intelligent, smaller – and of course lower cost.

But when it came to another card for 8x standard AINs or 16x standard Digital Inputs we thought why not just a card from someone else?

Import and export of DNP3 and Modbus tags

You can now export the DNP3 and Modbus tags as a .csv file and save it onto the CF card – or read it via ftp. And you can re-import the tag list back after modifying it.

This matters because as a default there are 400-500 tags in MultiSmart and if you want to play around with that configuration it takes a while through the user interface. Also you might want to synchronize data with a SCADA configuration file or master PLC.

Energy Monitoring and Energy Saving

v2 includes “Run the most efficient pump”, also known as “Alternation by efficiency”

This allows automatic saving of energy. You set a parameter for the ratio to run – e.g. run the most efficient pump 20:1 compared with the other pump(s). If it just ran the most efficient pump, the system could never get an opportunity to recheck – or to check the other pump runs ok.

How much do pumps drop in efficiency? I.e. how much can you save? It’s one of those values that people rarely know. As one major pump supplier said to us, “We all know the pump curve the day it leave the factory, but 1 year, 3 years later, what is it like? No one knows” They showed us a study they had done but it’s confidential. We did put some studies that we found on the Energy & Environment page on our main site, which indicated that wastewater pumps were often more than 15% below their original efficiency. Even clean water pumps can degrade significantly – always a surprise.

So the Run most efficient pump feature gives a change to automatically and easily save energy costs.

Other features

There’s a couple of other minor features:

• Digital Output pulse and delay functionality
• Support for relative level

How do I get v2?

Easy. I’m assuming you have a MultiSmart of course. If you don’t, and you have a lift station, try one out!

If you do, you can download the firmware for FREE from the multitrode.com website. You can find the link under the Training and Support section at http://www.multitrode.com/firmware-upgrades.php

You will need to signup on the site. If you don’t already have a login, just click the Signup button in the top right (of the main website), and check the box – Please give me access to the free MultiSmart firmware upgrades & release information. If you do already have a login and haven’t been in the MultiSmart firmware access section before, make sure you are logged in and click the Edit my account details link, then check the MultiSmart firmware access box.

We process that request manually so it usually takes a day, sometimes less - but if you are in a hurry you can always call up your MultiTrode office and speed things up.

How do I find out about New Versions?

Easy. Follow this blog. If you haven’t already subscribed just click the Subscribe by RSS    or Subscribe by Email icon in the top right. Find out about Subscribe by RSS.

Alternatively, or as well, to make sure you don’t miss anything, in the instructions above (”How do I get v2?”) about editing your login details to the MultiTrode site, you can check the box Please update me on email with all new releases of software or hardware in the MultiTrode family of products (MultiSmart/PumpView/Outpost2).

If you are a MultiSmart customer it’s well worth finding out the details of all the new features. It’s free to upgrade!

More about some minor MultiSmart updates since v2 in a later post..

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.

 

Diurnal Curve - Waste Water Treatment

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.

 

The functionality is programmed into the MultiSmart with the help of the PLC extension. More information about the PLC programming within MultiSmart is described towards the end of this blog. Data points at every hour mark is identified from the diurnal curve and saved to the parameter profile of the PLC program. This has the added advantage that the data values can be changed at any time without any change to the program whenever desired. However there are security measures in MultiSmart which will restrict any unauthorised access and modification to these parameter values which can affect its operation.

 

The PLC program looks at the current system time, calculates the value of the data point with respect to the diurnal curve and generates a corresponding output to the Analog output of the MultiSmart which is driving the dosing pump. The Analog output events were logged against the time using the built in Event Logger functionality in MultiSmart and we got the following result (graph plotted in Excel) when operated for nearly 20 hours.

  

 

MultiSmart Analog Output

 

The output stayed well within the expected range and was steady. The whole application was developed and the initial test was carried out successfully in less than 7 hours.

  

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.

 

A sample ISaGRAF program using function block diagram is shown below. The capability to show the run time statistics, including the values of variables, in the MultiSmart faceplate helps immensely in the development of the PLC program and in troubleshooting.

 

Example of ISaGRAF PLC Program with Fucntion Block Diagram for MultiSmart

 

The ISaGRAF TIC code can be dumped straight into the MultiSmart directory structure, which enhances the easiness in portability.