Water and wastewater business development leader Jacob Thompson took the stage at Schneider Electric’s WEFTEC booth Tuesday to provide a case study showcasing the benefits of the company’s open automation platform. Schneider’s Ecostruxure Automation Expert (EAE) is an open, software-defined automation platform for discrete, hybrid and continuous industrial processes where different hardware and software are orchestrated into one cohesive system.
Schneider recently helped the water department of Conroe, Texas, realize multiple operational efficiencies using EAE and other Schneider solutions.
Conroe is one one of the fastest growing cities in the country, experiencing 3 percent year-over-year growth in recent years, amounting to a total population gain of 65 percent since 2010. The water utility has two wastewater treatment plants, 22 water treatment plants and 60 lift stations spread across their entire infrastructure.
The city was experiencing three main problems with its treatment process. The first was that they were dealing with a vendor-locked programmable logic controller (PLC) system. The second was a lack of support with their controls. The third was constant intermittent communication issues with the equipment. When communications failed, technicians took to the field to manually calculate total flows and water volume being pulled from the wells.
In terms of the vendor-locked PLC problem, Thompson explained that EAE is an open automation platform that is truly open. “We don't care what hardware you have in the infrastructure. You could have all of our competitors. It doesn't matter. This solution consists of software that sits on top of the runtime environment, delivering complete openness to your control network—which we at Schneider believe is the future of controls,” he said.
In addition to the EAE software, Thompson said, Conroe used Schneider’s Modicon M262 controllers, which embed Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) protocols and encryption to provide direct cloud connectivity and digital services.
On an early visit to Conroe, Thompson had found that city water officials were using relatively expensive smart pump controllers, with each handling only a small number of pumps. “So, we asked, ‘Hey, what if we can consolidate? Let's remove all these unnecessary PLC cabinets, maybe consolidate them into one, and use the capabilities of the drives you already have in place to provide a level of redundancy,” Thompson said.
To ensure the integrity of communications, Schneider industrial PCs (IPCs) were used to historicize data locally, effectively buffering communications in the case of a network outages. “So, now when they have a communication issue, they’re not going back to the dark ages, having to manually calculate all the flows and things like that,” he said.
Thompson added that Conroe experienced flooding during Hurricane Harvey, but Schneider helped the water utility get up and running within five days. “So that really solidified the services aspect of what we do and how we do it,” he said.
