Project: Baton Rouge Wastewater Pump Station SCADA System (March 6, 2006)

By Control Engineering Staff March 13, 2006

Last week we discussed cell communications bandwidth usage, promising to give you some comparative data. Our comparison is based upon monitoring the system for the past 8-9 days.

After the changes made to aggregate data into 1 polled data block vs. 5 smaller data blocks, data usage went down about 80-85%. This shall save us a lot of bandwidth and will allow us to poll the sites more frequently. Along with the reduced bandwidth, the other advantage we saw was increased data accuracy. We had trouble reading a few blocks of data on an irregular basis. Our analysis over the past few days has shown that not a single data packet was lost after we made the changes.

We worked with the city engineer last week to get the city’s Nextel phone to recieve alarm messages. The tests showed that the messages were sent to the Nextel phone reliably in the form of e-mail messages. The city’s maintenance personnel have been instructed to take timely action upon receiving the alarm messages.

Our discussion with the city officials last week seems to indicate that the PLC selection for the 38 pump stations will be done soon. The engineers and contractors met with the PLC manufacturers last week to decide on the hardware. But, as always, we can just be optimistic and hopeful.