Real Time Performance Monitoring at a wastewater treatment plant

IPMS is able to provide real time data analysis and performance monitoring. Our automatic data entry systems allow users to export data directly from SCADA systems, data loggers, PDA's, etc. into the IPMS database via FTP, web based entry or even email. IPMS can then perform complex calculations on the raw instrument data to derive key performance indicators. These indicators can then be set to trigger alarms if a process starts to move outside its set operating band.

Objective

An industrial wastewater treatment plant required a system that could provide real time analysis for the plant processes. The system needed to take the raw data and calculate operating cost information and process efficiency. It then needed to signal the operating staff if the process performance started to change outside of set parameters.

Data Entry

No extra instrumentation was needed for the IPMS site. The existing meters were used and the data collected via the site SCADA system. These raw meter readings were then exported every 15 minutes and sent to the Meniscus FTP site for automated data import.

The raw data was fed through the calculation engine within IPMS to derive the benchmarking data used to analyse the plant performance. The whole process took less than 1 minute from the time of export from the SCADA system ensuring that the IPMS information was as up to date as possible.

Implementation

Data from the wastewater plant was seperated into a number of process units (i.e. activated sludge, sludge treatment etc). A combination or real time data and historic analytical data were used to calculate the key process performance measures for each process. Exceptions limits helped identify measures that moved out of their optimum range.  IPMS allowed historical data to be used with current data allowing trends and rates of change over time to be calculated and reported.

The final calculated figures were then reported via a set of process graphs to allow easy interpretation on the figures. These real time performance and cost graphs were made accessible at various levels within the operating staff to ensure everyone knew how the plant was operating.

Outcome

The IPMS site now provides a real time indicator of the overall site performance. It is able to spot trends within the complex SCADA system data and trigger alerts to the relevant staff so that they can take the appropriate actions before the process moves too far from its optimal performance.

The speed at which IPMS can process this complex analysis has helped to reduce the operating costs and risks associated with the plant.

As there was no need for any further instrumentation and no extra software was needed within the plant the overall disruption to the plant was minimal.