The sewage treatment plant is the infrastructure of modern society, which is used to purify waste water produced by households and enterprises. It uninterruptedly operates 24 hours a day, and waste water treatment involves multiple processes to remove solids, organic compounds and other substances. This complex workflow requires strict management, and only staff human supervision is far from enough. In addition, the quality of the source water can be changed instantaneously. Any negligence or mistake could lead to environmental pollution caused by water quality changes, and even endanger the health problems of water users. Therefore, automatic monitoring and control systems play a very important role in ensuring that treated waste water meets environmental regulations and government standards before being discharged into sewers or rivers.
However, how to effectively create a centralized monitoring and management system to maximize the value at the minimum cost, how to ensure the stability of the system and retain the future expansion capacity, all of these will be affected by the selection of hardware and software. USR IOT provides powerful software and a wide range of hardware product portfolios, including advanced cloud platform, transparent transfer, 4G industrial routers, serial to Ethernet converters, and IoT modules, etc. Many sewage treatment equipment are old equipment. At the initial design, automatic detection was not considered, only the serial port was retained. This requires the serial to Ethernet converter to transfer the serial data to the back-end manager through Ethernet, enabling system integrators to quickly complete waste water treatment plant projects with one-stop shopping without worrying about compatibility issues. By providing complete redundancy, the overall solution provides maximum reliability and ensures uninterrupted operation.
An automatic control technology company in Taiwan specializes in system design, planning and integration of government public construction projects, academic institutions and technology companies. Recently, it won the bid for the sewage treatment plant project of the Nanxing Land Development Plan of the Kaohsiung Free Trade Zone. In order to provide optimal configuration of the automatic monitoring and management system, the company integrates dozens of sewage treatment processes into one main station plus four substations (central control room, pumping station and sediment tank, biological treatment station, fast/slow) mixing and sewage station, chemical control and sludge treatment station).
Due to the complexity of the system, their technical team is looking for cost-effective integration solutions to accelerate project development with less effort. In terms of software, it must have extensible centralized management function and redundant function to complete remote monitoring and field data collection without losing data. It must also support open interface and Modbus protocol to easily access data and integrate various devices and provide various graphics libraries to represent data through animation in real time. With regard to hardware specifications, supporting structured text (ST) languages is a prerequisite because the company is accustomed to using them for programming. Providing the backup function and the fast recovery mechanism is also necessary to improve system reliability. They contact USR IOT.
System description
For this waste water treatment plant project, USR IOT provides a holistic solution. The installed NB-IoT network-based controller is equipped with various modules for acquiring and transmitting digital/analog signals from the four substations to the control center via the serial to Ethernet converters. The collected data is then displayed by using the transparent transfer cloud to enable centralized remote monitoring and control management.
Conclusion
In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), water/waste water treatment requires not only automatic monitoring, but also the preparation of functions for cloud services. The rich functionality and open architecture tools of USR IOT's products not only meet existing system requirements, but also take into account future expansions. Through this powerful platform, system integrators can significantly improve the efficiency of project development and after-sales maintenance.
