Digital system helps optimize plant operations

In today’s state-of-the-art water and wastewater treatment plants, automation leads to efficiency. When facilities can leave day-to-day operations to computers to do things on their own, they are typically done faster and without waste or error, meaning increased production at an always-important lower price point. 

Schneider Electric specializes in a complete line of digital tools for process optimization in water and wastewater operations. The offerings use the Industrial Internet of Things to help operators better manage their facilities. One of those offerings, EcoStruxure Hybrid DCS for Water, is an all-in-one automation solution that lets users engineer, operate and maintain an entire plant in a single common database. It combines the management of fieldbuses, instrumentation, intelligent connected devices, operator stations, engineering stations and alarm management in a scalable automation platform.

“Connected, IIoT-based solutions offer new levels of efficiency, reliability and insight into all aspects of the water and wastewater industry,” says Kakali Ray, vice president of sales at Schneider Electric. “These new technologies mark an exciting time when operators have both the process insights to understand their operations and make informed decisions, as well as the tools to implement real-time changes to optimize those operations.”

The ability to provide operators with clear process information is crucial to driving production efficiency. EcoStruxure Hybrid DCS for Water provides a consistent control and operational interface with a real-time view of processes to deliver operators all the services and data they need to make timely and accurate decisions. Trends seamlessly combine real-time and historical data. When users view a trend page, they can monitor the current activity as it happens and simply scroll back through time to view the trend history. The distributed trending system handles large amounts of asset data without compromising performance or data integrity.

EcoStruxure Hybrid DCS for Water provides common services like configuration, deployment, diagnostics, communication, security, connectivity, user collaboration and data sharing. These services enable the operator to build a single, unified model that logically represents the process and a plant infrastructure that represents the actual equipment. This makes design and maintenance of the system more efficient, more flexible and less risky, according to Schneider Electric. The model also gives essential context to collected data, assisting with diagnostics and troubleshooting. It also provides valuable system documentation throughout the system life cycle. 877-342-5173; www.schneider-electric.us