Custom SCADA Software Runs Public Works for Village
A community develops a customized SCADA system to provide mission-critical central control for their water distribution system.
Originally published in Water Environment & Technology magazine
The village of Winfield, Ill., delivers 2.8 million L/d (750 000 gal/d) of potable water to its 8625 people, and transfers 1.3 million L/d (350,000 gal/d) through one wastewater lift station. The distribution system consists of 58 km (36 mi) of buried pipe, one elevated storage tank, and 360 fire hydrants.
Before November 1996, all pump sequencing and control operations were performed with various local control measures, such as pressure switches and float switches. The need for a central system prompted the community to purchase a customized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system from Metropolitan Industries (Romeoville, Ill.).
Using Visual Tag System (VTS) operator interface software from Trihedral Engineering (Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada), the SCADA system allows the public works director to monitor and control operations from a computer at the public works building. The system uses seven Micro 16 remote terminal units from Control Microsystems (Kanata, Ontario, Canada) to communicate over land-based telephone lines. Two additional computers with VTS SCADA software are used by the village: one is at a pumping facility, and the other is a mobile Pentium laptop.
Operators now can check the status of any site with the touch of a button, according to Mike Tierney, divisional sales coordinator at Metropolitan Industries. "System set points, such as high-low level and pressure settings, can now be changed via the SCADA software either at the central site or from one of the other PCs," Tierney says. Remote pumps can be turned on and off from the public works building.
The value of the SCADA system installed by Winfield is $64 208. This includes $5010 for Trihedral's VTS software. The system also provides data collection and archiving, custom report generation, historical trending, and alarm notification messages specific to village policies and procedures. Because operators are informed of an alarm's location and the nature of the problem before traveling to a remote site, response time has improved and overtime and travel costs have been reduced, Tierney says.
For information on SCADA software from Trihedral Engineering, call 1-902-835-1575.
