Gateway helps monitor Italian water plants
Gateway helps monitor Italian water plants
Four water treatment plants sit in the Milan area, part of northern Italy. Novus s.r.l., a company that specializes in water treatment technology and a service center for a Canadian UV system manufacturer, needed to oversee the control of the plants’ water treatment sensors…from the manufacturer’s headquarters, where system specialists are constantly present and ready to support customers worldwide.
The manufacturer is a leader in the UV water treatment systems market that wants to provide its customers with top-notch technical support. The company knew that constant monitoring of its plants would allow it to obtain savings in terms of energy consumption, because it would allow Novus’ specialists to check the running parameters and adjust the system settings in the plants in real time.
Novus wanted to explore options to let it have a centralized monitoring system to support its customers on daily operations and troubleshooting. This would also help them reduce travel expenses.
E.S.A Engineering, a system integrator in Italy, proposed using ProSoft Technology’s ICX35 Industrial Cellular Gateway, which would communicate with a FactoryTalk® View SE SCADA system. In addition to allowing the company to monitor the plants at all times, the gateway supported 4G LTE with fallback to 3G, enabling high-speed data rates, clear communications, and longevity for the application.
With the gateway, Novus specialists would be able to analyze in real time the running parameters from each system under the real water conditions, and suggest the right settings to customer operators and maintenance technicians. This would help them decrease power usage while maintaining disinfection requirements.
E.S.A Engineering Technical and Sales Engineer Salvatore Perrucci had prior knowledge of ProSoft solutions’ quality and technical support.
“In more than 15 years, ProSoft products have always met our expectations, and they are very easy to use because of the good-quality manuals,” Mr. Perrucci said.
Beyond the benefits brought by 4G communications, Novus appreciated streamlined communications between the SCADA system and the plants’ controllers thanks to the gateway’s Ethernet Layer 2 connections. The company also enjoyed real-time control for diagnostics, in addition to optimized maintenance.
(While Novus opted to use a VPN private server for its application, the Industrial Cellular Gateway can also be used for secure remote access via Belden Horizon™, a cloud-native platform.)
With this new setup, Novus is able to propose to its customers remote supervision of the system and reply exactly to the HMI in the field in order to share data with customer maintenance technicians in real time.
And at the end of the installation an extra perk was discovered: The server, through the modem connected to the PLC, allows the specialist in Canada to work on the PLC like it was on his desk.