1 July 2009

When the City of Thunder Bay built a lake-to-lake water treatment plant, Wonderware provided the technology to ensure its efficient management.

The City of Thunder Bay is a growing community on the shores of Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada. In order to provide safe drinking water and protect the environment, Thunder Bay decided to implement ‘lake-to-lake’ water management – taking water from Lake Superior through the treatment process to the distribution system, and then back through the pollution control plant before returning it to the environment. It built the Bare Point Water Treatment Plant using an advanced ultra-filtration system to purify the city’s water while expanding daily capacity from 14 million gallons to 25 million gallons (53-95 million litres).

Finding a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, that could meet the current and future needs of the new facility, was crucial. Bare Point required accurate, real-time data gathering regardless of location; data recording and logging; alarms for threshold conditions; and secure information storage in an easy-to-use system that could provide comprehensive reports. After evaluating the options, Thunder Bay chose a solution from Wonderware.

The Bare Point plant is controlled by a Microsoft Windows-based system utilising Wonderware Terminal Services software located in the operations centre of the main plant. Wonderware InTouch Human Machine Interface software forms the core of the solution, while Wonderware Historian provides a high-performance, real-time and historical database to integrate the operations centre with the plant floor. As an extension of Microsoft SQL Server, it collects comprehensive operating statistics and integrates these with event, summary, production and configuration data. For desktop-based analysis and reporting, Wonderware ActiveFactory software – part of the Wonderware ArchestrA architecture – was designed into the system. Process engineers can spot trends in real time and prepare historical reports, which can be exported to Microsoft Excel.

The solution’s intuitive interfaces enabled rapid design, installation and testing. Canadian system integrator Automation Now, supported by Wonderware Canada East, ensured that Bare Point was operational within one year.

Today, engineers enjoy end-to-end control of plant processes, while employees in the operating centre can see real-time representations of the water moving through the facility. Scada terminals enable access to the system throughout the plant. Wonderware SCADAlarm notifies employees – both on the SCADAlarm screen and a plant-wide alarm system – if a reading is out of a predetermined range. Redundant servers securely store plant data for retrieval in the event of a failure, while Wonderware Historian’s reporting capabilities enable management to maximise plant efficiency and accelerate expansion plans.

Return on investment has come in record time. Real-time reporting has enabled more effective regular maintenance for reduced downtime, and historical trending reports have led to greater visibility and increased operational efficiencies. The biggest ROI is anticipated as remote stations are added. Automation Now expects development time for these to be halved, realising efficiencies and cost savings during expansion.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2009 edition of Prime.

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