Woodland Park Wastewater Treatment Facility is a municipal treatment plant serving a local population of around 6,500. In 2017, they started the process to expand the capacity of their plant and upgrade several of the underlying systems. This included the addition of several new turnkey subsystems, the transfer of control for several motors from soft starters to VFDs, the addition of new devices and sensors associated with the capacity buildout, and a retrofit of the PLC / SCADA system.
As part of the expansion and retrofit package, DMC was brought in to provide expertise for the controls component. After performing preliminary PLC and SCADA development, DMC worked in tandem with the construction contractors to architect and execute a control system swap that required less than a single day of PLC downtime.
How It Works
The control upgrade involved replacing a legacy Allen-Bradley PLC and SCADA system with a modern equivalent consisting of a ControlLogix 5580 PLC and a PC-based FactoryTalk View SE SCADA. In order to support the additional devices, the expansion involved the addition of two ethernet-tied AB 1756 racks functioning as remote I/O for the 5580. Network communication to a variety of vendor skids and other devices was established using the following standards and methods: Modbus, Ethernet I/P, communication between AB PLC and Siemens drive with Standard Telegraph.
In addition to having a greater throughput capacity, Woodland Park Wastewater Treatment Plant can regulate their process more tightly and run their equipment more efficiently. These benefits are due to a combination of additional sensing capability and the switch from starters to drives. This allows for continuous process control rather than discrete on/off control of the equipment that was previously implemented.
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