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Kewanee, IL -- Background: Compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and improving its ability to maintain and upgrade the water treatment system led the City of Kewanee to install a state-of-the-art control system that would serve the needs of the city and surrounding community for many years.
The system, installed with help from Engineered Fluid Inc. and Rockwell Automation, cut communication response times in half and greatly improved remote monitoring capabilities.
The City of Kewanee, located between Peoria and Moline, is a small city in west central Illinois. The water treatment facility houses three water pumping stations responsible for filtering and treating drinking water for more than 13,000 people.
Challenge: All city water systems must comply with the SDWA of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Established in 1974 by the Environmental Protection Agency, the SDWA regulates the quality of the nation’s public drinking water supply and allows the EPA to set standards for quality and oversee the states, localities and water suppliers who implement these standards. By federal law, all city water systems must comply with the EPA’s SDWA.
In addition to making changes to meet these standards and anticipating even more in the future, the City of Kewanee was concerned about the ability of its proprietary system to keep up. The existing water treatment system had become more difficult to modify and maintain.
"Replacement parts were becoming obsolete, and alternative technologies needed to increase the lifespan of existing equipment were becoming very hard to find," said Mike Johnson, project engineer at Engineered Fluid, manufacturers of water distribution equipment.
The City of Kewanee knew it needed an updated control system and identified three criteria for the purchase:
· Flexibility and scalability to stay ahead of tightening SDWA standards;
· Ease of use, troubleshooting and maintenance to reduce unscheduled downtime; and
· Remote monitoring and control of three pumping stations by the city's lean staff.
Solution: Engineered Fluid managed the upgrade project and selected Rockwell Automation to help design and install the new control system, which featured Allen-Bradley® programmable controllers (PLCs) and graphic terminals from Rockwell Automation.
“We chose Rockwell Automation because it has the best reputation for helping its customers achieve success through advanced automation experience and technology,” said Johnson. “It gives us a competitive edge, and its global reach allows our customers to buy replacement parts or receive training anywhere around the world.”
This same technology is used by automated factories and industrial facilities worldwide to improve quality, reduce costs, increase productivity and allow for flexibility to respond to industry changes.
The control system works well with the city’s current Reverse Osmosis (RO) filtering system. When the RO system prepares to filter impurities from the water, the controllers turn on pumps that flush wells allowing the water to be clean enough to push into the RO system.
To enable communication among the three pumping stations, Engineered Fluid installed an Allen-Bradley SLC™ 5/03 controller at the plant’s central facility and MicroLogix™ 1200 controllers at each of the two remote stations. The controllers communicate via DF1 Radio Modem protocol, which can be used in either a traditional master/slave radio network or in a peer-to-peer, masterless network configuration. This technology has a higher degree of reliability than telephone carriers and allows city staff to take full control of the operation and maintenance of their supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) communication networks from any of the three sites.
Engineered Fluid also installed Rockwell Automation Software RSView®32™ human machine interface (HMI) software with Allen-Bradley PanelView™ 1000 operator terminals for monitoring and tracking the operation of the water purification system. RSView32 software allows operators to monitor the entire treatment process including water levels, chemical application, flow raters and chlorine content.
Results: Working with Rockwell Automation, Engineered Fluid was able to reduce the communication response time for the City of Kewanee’s RO system in half. Prior to implementing the DF1 Radio Modem protocol, it took approximately 60 seconds for an operator to receive an update. Now, an operator gets updates in 30 seconds.
"The engineers responsible for monitoring the water supply and making all the necessary changes to keep it clean and available for consumption have increased confidence in the system due to the rapid response rate of the network,” said Johnson.
The SLC 500 and MicroLogix controllers also help keep the water clean by managing how much water is pumped out of the clear wells and keeping the RO systems balanced. This is crucial in providing quality water because when water sits, bacteria-fighting chemicals, such as chlorine, can evaporate.
With new control system, the City of Kewanee has worked with Rockwell Automation to meet its goals relative to the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Equally important, the city now has a progressive water treatment system that will take it into the future.
“A reliable supply of good quality water is something we often take for granted,” Johnson said. “But when you are responsible for providing safe drinking water for an entire community, you need complete confidence in the technology you’re using to deliver this supply. For the city of Kewanee, that’s something they now have.”
For more information contact:
Ms. Ann Ziegler
Rockwell Automation
1201 South Second Street
Milwaukee, WI 53204
Telephone: (414) 382-0387
Fax: (414) 382-4477
Web site: http://www.rockwellautomation.com/
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Water and Wastewater.com
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