Synchrony Upgrades Municipal Water System

Synchrony Upgrades Municipal Water System

The Town of Vinton, located in Southwestern Virginia, has a large distributed water/wastewater system comprised of numerous wells, water storage tanks, and sewage lift stations. Several years ago, Synchrony began working with the Town's Public Works Department (PWD) and a local engineering firm to develop a SCADA/RTU system that would provide remote monitoring and control; data collection; and reporting functionality. Recently Synchrony was awarded the third and final planned stage of the upgrade project. Before implementing the new state-of-the-art control system, Vinton's water control system was comprised of a variety of both proprietary and standard control equipment provided by a number of different vendors and installed in a piece-meal fashion over a number of years. Each Remote Telemetry Unit (RTU) utilized different hardware and control techniques. No central data collection, monitoring, or reporting system existed. Troubleshooting was dependent upon the experience of the employees that had worked on the system. Vinton desired to resolve a number of these issues with an upgrade to their water/wastewater control system. Their
primary goal, however, was to have a standard, easily expandable system that could grow as they grew. Additional features desired included high reliability, redundancy, readily available data, and reduced data collection times. Most distributed water control systems utilize a central or master control unit that coordinates all communication. Vinton's desire of a highly reliable system led Synchrony to develop an architecture that does not require this master control unit. Direct site to site communication eliminated this single point of failure which has not only increased the reliability of the system, but has also eased the process of making modifications to their central SCADA units. Since the architecture developed by Synchrony no longer required a "master" node for relaying data, it was now rather trivial to add additional SCADA nodes. In Vinton, the public works department only works weekends in emergencies. Water and wastewater systems, however, require some level of monitoring 24x7. It was decided that a second SCADA node would be installed at Vinton's emergency dispatch center which is staffed 24x7. With a bit of training the staff at the emergency dispatch center can determine if an issue requires immediate attention (sewage lift station failure) or can wait until the PWD is open (one well pump fails).
	Vinton's personnel desired a system that would be easy to maintain. The old system required regular review of outdated drawings and operations manuals to find and resolve issues. In order to make system troubleshooting easier, the system supplied by Synchrony offers "windows" into the system at multiple locations. Each SCADA node provides a view of the entire system with enough information to determine the location and nature of an issue. At all the control telemetry unit sites a Human Machine Interface (HMI) provides more specific information about the site and the ability to manually control and operate all local equipment. Prior to implementing the new SCADA/RTU system at Vinton, each remote site was visited daily to record data required by the State. These trips to each site have been eliminated by bringing all required data to a central location. Reports are now available from the SCADA system requiring only to be printed and signed before sending to the State. Having completed two of the three phases of this project, Vinton is well on its way to having a water/wastewater
control and monitoring system that will serve them for many years. The system has been developed with common "off-the-shelf" products such that any future expansion can be implemented in a standard manner.