Lake County Public Water District Grows With the Help of InduSoft by InduSoft

Lake County Public Water District Grows With the Help of B&W Control Systems Integration and InduSoft Upgrades to Lake County Public Water District SCADA system added redundancy, remote monitoring, and current PLC communications • InduSoft Web Studio (IWS) made upgrading from a system installed almost 10 years prior extremely easy. • InduSoft Web Studio proved to be the ideal solution for the current requirements and planned future upgrades of the Lake County Public Water District. • The developer found IWS “very intuitive, straightforward, and everything proceeded with a minimum of time spent in additional development.”

Figure 1: Clear, informational and easy to use interface for pump house monitoring

Background Municipal water districts are integral aspects of the infrastructure of any city. Water and wastewater treatment are absolutely vital for any city, and in order to meet both state and federal regulations, water treatment must be carefully monitored. From the water source to the tap, there is a complex process that city water supplies must go through to maintain safety and reliability. Oversight of the process is an important way to ensure that water supplies make it through the entire process while adhering to health and safety regulations and reliably providing water to a large number of residents. The Lake County Public Water District, which serves the City of Zion, the Village of Winthrop Harbor and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (Illinois Beach State Park and North Point Marina) on a nonprofit basis, recently found their system in need of an upgrade. B&W Control Systems Integration was chosen for this large municipal project.

B&W Control Systems Integration specializes in municipal clientele and does everything from facility automation to water and wastewater SCADA and remote SCADA applications. The Lake County water/ wastewater treatment SCADA application was built using InduSoft Web Studio, and it presented B&W with an opportunity to work with new SCADA development software. The Challenge The application monitors a water treatment plant that services Zion, Illinois, among other nearby towns. The plant pumps in water from Lake Michigan. Low lift pumps bring water into the plant, and then take it to the main water facility where it goes through three different clarifiers. During this stage of the process,

Continued from front page... Figure 3: Discharge pressure and flow rates are shown as 24 hour trends, and current values are displayed allowing operators to make informed decisions.

Figure 2: Overview screens offer a real-time view of the process.

mixers, water levels, pumps, valves, and equipment failures are all monitored by the SCADA system. The clarifiers feed the water through four different filters. Here, the application monitors and records data such as water levels, pump and valve activity, the backwash process, and the time the water spends in each step of the process. The water is fed into the clearwell where three high service pumps move it into a large storage tank. The application keeps track of the water flow in each stage of the process, and also monitors the main storage tanks.

plant active at all times. The upgrade required that B&W incorporate a remote SCADA solution. An additional requirement for the project included adding redundancy measure to ensure that the plant remained online in the event of a hardware failure.

The largest challenge of the project was the upgrade of equipment. Lake County’s current architecture made use of outdated PLCs with proprietary protocols. For the new system, Allen Bradley Control Logix PLCs were employed in a massive upgrade plant wide. This new upgrade would take the plant from producing 4.5 million gallons of water per day to producing 6.5 million gallons per day.

The Solution The upgrade for The Lake County Public Water District was able to incorporate all the functionality of the original system, and introduce the new features necessitated for the upgrade. B&W developer Jim Gramhofer said, “Upgrading the InduSoft application went perfectly. We only had to install the new software, copy the data over and plug in the new information, and everything went off without a hitch.”

Another unique challenge of the project included the need for remote process monitoring to help keep the

The current SCADA software used by Lake County was InduSoft Web Studio v4.0. The developer who worked on the project, Jim Gramhofer, was tasked with upgrading an unfamiliar SCADA system using a newer iteration of the software, with new PLCs and additional tag requirements.

The upgrade brought the application from version 4.0 of InduSoft Web Studio to v7.0. InduSoft develops new versions

“

Upgrading the InduSoft application went perfectly. We only had to install the new software, copy the data over and plug in the new information, and everything went off without a hitch.

”

— Jim Gramhofer, B&W Developer

of the software with compatibility in mind, meaning that even applications developed in the first iteration of InduSoft Web Studio can still be developed in the newest version. This allows plant owners to upgrade equipment such as PLCs and computers with the assurance that development time used to create the original application for the system is not lost. Integration can be performed easily for upgrades because the application will still be compatible with the new software. Another benefit of using InduSoft for the upgrade was

the fact that the drivers required to connect with the new Allen Bradley PLCs are native within the software. No additional modules or protocols needed to be purchased to connect directly with the new hardware. B&W added some redundancy features to the system during the upgrade. Before, the InduSoft Web Studio based SCADA system resided on one server. The new architecture includes two rack servers that act as a redundant pair. The licenses included with these redundant servers also offered Lake County two additional remote thin client viewers that clients can use to connect to the system. This web connectivity was a great addition to the upgrade. With the thin client viewers, the plant operators and supervisors can monitor the process from remote locations, such as offices or homes. This ensures that it’s easy to take the SCADA system with the personnel wherever they go, and helps ensure that alarms are addressed as soon as possible. This improves the safety and reliability of the system, and reduces downtime in a critical municipal utility. One aspect of the upgrade that went especially well included the changing of tag names to include more

Figure 5: Clarifier status is monitored and displayed on a representation of the physical layout. Effluent and influent valve status, along with mixer RPMs are monitored closely.

Figure 4: The historian screen provides quick access to logged values back to any time or date. Clicking on the trend provides instant access to all the recorded values for that period.

Figure 7: Filter Control, PID set points, and valve status are all observed and adjusted from a convenient location, with real-time feedback.

Figure 6: Clearwell levels, and set point are adjusted and monitored. Clear layouts reduce operator errors.

descriptive titles. According to Gramhofer, “The old system tags were cryptic, and the ability to go in and change tag names without disrupting anything was really useful. I haven’t seen this in any other SCADA software solutions. The Result The smooth transition between the upgrade process of equipment and software went exceptionally smoothly. The project requirements were met with a minimum of time spent in additional development. Gramhofer, who was new to developing in InduSoft Web Studio said “It’s easy to work with InduSoft from the very beginning, and very intuitive. The development was straightforward, and even without the class, it’s easy to pick up the software very quickly.”

comes included with the software solution. Because InduSoft Web Studio can perform all the necessary functions of a SCADA software and includes all the tools without requiring additional add-ons and modules, it’s the ideal solution for any SCADA integration client with a fixed budget. The Lake County Public Water District intends to continue using InduSoft Web Studio for future upgrades, and is planning on upgrading to a higher tag count very soon as they continue to modify their current architecture.

A key point that B&W noted in working with InduSoft Web Studio was the rich feature set that For more information contact your local distributor or InduSoft directly at info@indusoft.com or 877-INDUSOFT (877-463-8763) or 512-349-0334.