Design and Construction of Instrumentation, Control and Computer System Upgrade at One of Country’s Largest Water and Wastewater Treatment Complexes  

Emerson Process Management (USA) announce it has successfully completed the design and construction (Phase One) of a multi-year initiative to modernize the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s (DWSD) vast water and wastewater treatment complexes with its Ovation® control and SCADA solution. This comprehensive automation and control solution helps DWSD improve operational efficiency, maintain regulatory and environmental compliance, and accommodate future system expansion. With this major undertaking now complete, Emerson has entered the seven-year comprehensive systems maintenance portion (Phase Two) of the project.

The DWSD project is noteworthy for its considerable scope, complexity and anticipated long-term positive impact on operations. DWSD, a municipally owned utility, provides roughly 4 million residents in southeastern Michigan with an average of 710 million gallons of water per day. Its main Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) – among the largest single-site WWTPs in the United States – collects and treats residential, commercial and industrial wastewater for 78 municipal communities. To enhance service, process and operational efficiency, and to meet the need for future expansion, DWSD initiated a multi-phase, multi-million-dollar upgrade program encompassing its water distribution system, wastewater collection system and WWTP. As part of this comprehensive program, Emerson was selected to design, assemble, test and implement a new Department-wide Instrumentation, Control and Computer System (ICCS). The contract also called for Emerson to train more than 700 DWSD operators, maintenance technicians and engineers on the new ICCS, as well as maintain the system for a designated period of time.

The ICCS upgrade project covers more than 1,000 square miles and includes the WWTP, five water treatment plants, 23 treated water booster pump stations, five high-lift pump stations, 10 wastewater pump stations, three Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) basins, and more than 170 remote radio telemetry sites monitoring level, pressure and discharge.
Emerson’s integrated Ovation control and SCADA solution included installation of a WWTP Plant Control Center (PCC) connected to six new Area Control Centers (ACC), as well as an overall System Control Center (SCC) that monitors and controls the entire water distribution system and wastewater collection system. The SCC features a 43-foot-by-8-foot video display wall that provides geographic images of the entire service area, including all facilities, pump stations and critical sensors. For each facility and monitoring location, system information – including water pressure, valve positions, pump and equipment status, rain data, sewer levels and flows – is collected and broadcast over the network. All the information received or generated by the system is also stored in a high-capacity historian so that it can be used to plot trends, analyze events and project future operational requirements.

In all, the Ovation network architecture features more than 40 integrated Ovation systems monitoring and controlling approximately 30,000 I/O points.
Replacing outdated controls with the state-of-the-art Ovation system offers DWSD a number of significant benefits, including better management of distributed systems and remote sites, streamlined environmental reporting, improved water/wastewater process control reliability, and reduced operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. For example, because operators at the water distribution and wastewater collection systems now have access to real-time data from throughout the system, they are able to more quickly detect and isolate system leaks as well as better react to rapidly changing conditions such as storm water inflow.

“The Ovation control system provides DWSD with a capability we did not have before – to access and analyze data on a department-wide basis,” said PJ Dada, assistant director of DWSD. “The value of the information available to us through the Ovation control system has streamlined our regulatory reporting, made it easier to quickly respond to disruptions, and enables us to provide accurate and timely information to our customers – which translates into improved overall efficiency.”

Emerson’s Ovation control and SCADA solution is part of the company’s broad portfolio of automation, analytical and optimization solutions for the water/wastewater industry. These include the PlantWeb® digital plant architecture which leverages the Ovation control and SCADA system, ControlWave RTU technology, AMS® Suite of predictive maintenance software, intelligent field devices, valve automation and asset optimization solutions. The Ovation solution offers an integrated control architecture that improves the economics of water and wastewater organizations by delivering greater insight into plant processes, assets and overall operations for enhanced operational flexibility, reliability and efficiency.