Water forum promotes sustainable solutions for water industry

Rockwell Automation recently hosted the ‘Innovations for Smart, Safe, Sustainable Automation Solutions in the Water Industry’ forum in Adelaide in May. The forum provided interested parties an opportunity to discuss and share ideas and hear from a range of speakers on best practices and innovations for the industry. The event was well attended by consulting engineers, water utility companies, government departments and system integrators.

Opening the forum was Joe Flynn, CEO of Water Industry Alliance (SA), along with Twain Drewett, Regional Director Australia and New Zealand, Rockwell Automation. Topics discussed were innovations for automation, information, power and safety solutions for the water industry. Of particular interest were process control and reverse osmosis, minimising the effects of harmonics in variable speed drives, condition monitoring and network security.

Water filtration is an important part of processing wastewater for use in plant applications or irrigation. Rockwell Automation presented its PlantPAx process control solution to demonstrate how this can be implemented as a platform for reverse osmosis units which enable plants to process, recycle or filter water for various uses.

Water processing plants require large motors and pumps to control the high volumes of liquids being treated. Variable speed drives (VSDs) are an integral part of multiple pumping and dosing applications as the volumes of water can vary for different stages of treatment. These large VSDs electronically control the speed of a motor but in doing so inject harmonics that appear on the power grid. There are requirements for water treatment plants to meet certain guideline levels of harmonics. Peter Tomazic, Solutions Consultant - SSB, Rockwell Automation, discussed the importance of minimising harmonics electronically, using filters.

Ian Liebler, Solutions Architect - ICM, Rockwell Automation, delivered a presentation on condition monitoring applications for the water industry. Condition monitoring is essential for proactive maintenance and managing assets of a plant. Greg Schultz, State Sales Manager, SA/NT, Rockwell Automation, said, “With important factors affecting the water industry, such as condition monitoring, the use of VSDs and alarming of operators in emergency situations, it is important to put thought into using your best practices.”

Colour is used in human machine interface (HMI) for SCADA applications. However, for better response to emergency situations, a worldwide trend in HMI is to move away from colour. John Karageorgos, Managing Director, Manta Controls, discussed the latest trends in alarm design concepts that use a grey scale with alarm symbols in different colours to be more easily recognisable to SCADA plant operators.

Security features of remote terminal units (RTUs) are critical to ensure the safety and efficiency of water processing plants. Bob Hicks, Solutions Architect - IA, Rockwell Automation, discussed the applications of RTUs and PLCs and the importance of the DNP-3 (Distributed Network Protocol 3.0) Secure Authentication. Hicks explained that the main strength of RTUs is the robust environmental specifications and DNP-3 is an evolving standard based on authentication, not encryption, using a challenge/response model.