Sanitising drinking water.

A Municipal Water Treatment Plant is using Blue-White's FLEXFLO® Peristaltic Metering Pumps successfully to meter sodium hypochlorite to sanitize drinking water.

Chlorine has been used to disinfect drinking water in the USA, and in many other regions throughout the world, since the early 1900s, and it remains the most frequently used municipal water disinfectant worldwide due to its low cost and effectiveness at deactivating a wide range of pathogens. The two most common chlorine products for this application are chlorine gas (Cl₂) and sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl), a.k.a. bleach. For the most part, both chlorine compositions function the same way, in that they dissolve in water to form free chlorine in the form of hypochlorous acid (HOCl) and hypochlorite ion (OCl−).

Despite this similarity, they are two very different products. Choosing which form of chlorine chemical to use is an important decision among municipal drinking water managers, and requires balancing many factors including the overall costs, safety procedures and risk management, and more.

The Challenge.
A Municipal Water Treatment Plant located in Indiana supplies drinking water to 60,000 city residents, as well as surrounding populations.

The treatment plant had been using Gas Chlorine to treat their drinking water however, for many reasons including the increased safety issues associated with using gas chlorine, transportation issues, and requirements for advanced emergency management plans to be in place, the decision was made to switch from the Gas Chlorine to less problematic Sodium Hypochlorite, liquid chlorine.

The change to Liquid Chlorine meant that the equipment being used to feed the chemical also had to be switched out. The preferred method for delivering the 12% concentration of Sodium Hypochlorite at 30PSI is Chemical Dosing / Metering Pumps.

Because sodium hypochlorite poses some of its own challenges, careful consideration was given to the type of pump to be used, Diaphragm or Peristaltic. One of those challenges is that, as the chemical begins to degrade during the treatment process it produces bubbles. Most often referred to as off-gassing. These bubbles will eventually cause diaphragm-style pumps to vapor lock and lose their prime resulting in increased maintenance, downtime, and added expense.

The Solution.

FLEXFLO® M4 metering pumps in situ

For this reason, the decision was made to install Peristaltic Metering Pumps to dose the hypochlorite. Peristaltic pumps are not affected by air bubbles, the bubbles simply move through the pump tubing, while the pump maintains a constant rate of flow with no potential for vapor lock. Because of this characteristic, Peristaltic pumps have been widely accepted as the preferred technology in many applications, including municipal drinking water.

Also taken into consideration was, other than occasional pump tube replacement, peristaltic units do not require regular maintenance. Diaphragm pumps, on the other hand, require ongoing maintenance as valves and pump heads must be regularly cleaned.

The Water Treatment Plant initially purchased a total of eight FLEXFLO® M3 and M4 Peristaltic Metering Pumps, manufactured by Blue-White® Industries. Seven of the pumps are used to meter the Sodium Hypochlorite to sanitize the drinking water. The eighth pump is used to dose Polymer into the blending system to get solids to settle at the bottom of the filters. There are a total of 11 FLEXFLO pumps now in service throughout the plant.

The Result.
The results have been outstanding. The Water Treatment Plant Manager appreciated the excellent outcome achieved with the switch to Sodium Hypochlorite and FLEXFLO Chemical Feed Pumps. In addition, they were grateful for the expert consultation and service they received from Paul Hayes at Living Waters.

FLEXFLO® Chemical Metering Pumps dependably deliver smooth and accurate chemical dosing to the system. Operators appreciate the pump’s bright, easy-to-access, and highly responsive 5-inch display screen, and the intuitive screen is as simple to work as a cell phone and features easily recognizable icons.

They have a wide 10,000:1 turndown ratio to meet a broad range of dosing requirements and are equipped with a brushless DC motor for trouble-free and energy-efficient service.

M3 remote control signal options include Pulse, 4-20mA, and as technologies advance, these metering pumps are field upgradable.

@BlueWhiteInd #Water #Automation

Optimising beer production.

ABB's Ability™ BeerMaker intelligent process control solution further supports breweries in their operational efficiency through digital transformation. ABB’s brewmaster, who has the notable achievement of qualifications from Technical University of Munich in Weihenstephan (D), devised the new package alongside a team with deep process knowhow.

It will benefit beermakers seeking to optimize their processes, reduce their impacts on water and energy resources and meet consumer demand for more sustainably crafted drinks. The new solution is based on the ABB Ability™ System 800xA^® *distributed control system and will help brewers improve process quality, achieve high engineering and operator efficiency, enhance safety and boost plant productivity. It has been made available to ABB’s end customers and channel partners.

As part of its launch, ABB Ability BeerMaker will be presented at this year’s drinktec, the world’s leading beverage and liquid food trade fair, held in Munich from September 12 to 16. The timing of the event coincides with the city’s Oktoberfest, which returns after a two-year break due to COVID-19 and runs from September 17 to October 3.

The process automation solution comprises a technological package including a control system with batch functionality following the worldwide S88 standard and a digital twin to simulate new recipes. Crafted and tested with brewing knowledge from ABB’s brewmaster, it can be adapted for each customer using a variety of parameters.

Ready-made and tested templates and objects bring a high level of automation and intelligence of plant functions into operators’ hands. There is a prepared inventory for queue handling, diagnostics and comprehensive cleaning in place (CIP) support.

Designed to meet the industry’s need for intuitive, visual solutions, BeerMaker will help to empower operators to manage their preferred operating procedures and have freedom to use the package on computers, tablet or mobile devices. Teams can gain greater process certainty by testing on a real-time digital twin, a complete and operational representation of the control system and a powerful tool for companies deciding on a new strategy to easily simulate new recipes.

Additional digital solutions based on ABB Ability™ Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) have the capabilities to identify energy consumption, beer or extract losses and provide reporting functions and dashboard visualization. These include the ABB Ability™ BatchInsight concept, which can use big data analytics to identify process anomalies at the earliest stages. Operators and customer brewmasters will benefit from making decisions in real time to further improves processes, quality and productivity.

“Our new solution is from our own ABB brewmaster for brewmasters and truly has domain-specific knowledge embedded as well as ABB’s expertise from years in this field,” said Marcello Gulinelli, Global Head of Food and Beverage, Process Automation, ABB.

“We’re confident it is a technological package that is ready for advanced and digital solutions,” said Gernut van Laak, Brewmaster and Global Food and Beverage Solution Manager, ABB. “It can be applied within a customer’s installed base to enhance efficiencies and help reach sustainability targets.”

“We are using the full breadth of our automation and control system platform and connect the whole factory, including shop floor operations, simulation, digital and control room solutions, with less engineering and always with the possibility for expansion. We’re looking forward to further work with brewing customers to optimize to their plant specifics.”

Breweries will experience intuitive controls and high-performance human-machine interfacing, fast detection and resolution of process disturbances, consistent alarm messages, report management and standard operating procedures (SOPs), while engineers will benefit from a structured application design with process technology functions, and powerful pre-testing with built-in simulation.

* ABB Ability System 800xA has helped the global technology leader to remain the #1 distributed control system market leader for 22 years as ranked by the ARC Advisory Group.

@ABBgroupnews @abb_automation #PAuto #Brewing

Supervising fermentation in champagne tanks!

Veuve Clicquot is a French champagne house known the world over. Founded in 1772, this prestigious house is now a subsidiary of LVMH. Its reputation is no accident. The house does not compromise on quality and its motto is 'Only one quality – the finest'. In order to ensure that it always makes the finest champagne, it also needs to be able to closely supervise its production systems.

Champagne producer Veuve Clicquot chooses PcVue to supervise its tanks

That is why, in late 2012, Veuve Clicquot revamped its fermentation cellar supervision system. The fermentation cellars are where the house makes its wine from harvested and pressed grapes. Supervising the tanks in which alcoholic and malolactic fermentation take place is crucial. However, the software being used by Veuve Clicquot was at the end of its life and the producer was no longer supporting it. It was therefore necessary that the house replace its 10-year-old supervision system by a more recent and better performing solution.

"We needed to replace it by a lasting solution that would be supported for many years to come," says Franck Berruyer, sales engineer at Arc Informatique, the company behind the PcVue supervision system installed at Veuve Clicquot.

"In addition to various technical factors, we chose the PcVue 10 software suite because of the relationship of trust we have maintained with Arc Informatique and because the cost of the licences is economically suited to Veuve Clicquot's needs," says Stéphane Fournier, manager of SF2I, the company that developed and integrated the supervision software. Another advantage of PcVue is that it has the same HMI as the previous software, meaning that the operators were able to use PcVue immediately. Furthermore, Guy Jendryka, manager of the electricity, automation and industrial computing department at Veuve Clicquot, stresses that one of PcVue's strengths is that it is easy to adjust and program. "With the previous system, you really had to be an IT specialist to be able to upgrade the software. PcVue is much easier to modify as needed."

The development architecture is based on PcVue objects and greatly facilitated the supervision software's design. Because Veuve Clicquot's fermentation cellars contain 400 tanks of various types and volumes (50 hl to 725 hl), the developers had to be able to use models so as to reduce programming, and hence maintenance times. Depending on their type, the tanks are fitted with up to three temperature-control sensors and manual or automatic valves. The application manages some 40 variables per tank for a total of 16,000! "The object development architecture saves time and simplifies operations. Once the model was made for the dozen existing tank models, it was simply a matter of instantiating the objects and automatically generating the communication variables," says Mr Fournier.

With its virtual architecture, PcVue runs on a server that is installed in a secure, air-conditioned and filtered room protected from the damp. The application's maintainability and portability on new physical machines is thus simplified. The fact that, in such a virtualised environment, the software is decoupled from the hardware means that reinstallation and commissioning times in the event of failure are considerably reduced.

The operators control the PcVue supervision
software via a 42" touch screen installed at the
entrance to the fermentation cellars.

Five web-based clients allow the cellar managers to view the supervision system and select its setpoints via their PC. Operators can also monitor and control the software via a 42" touch screen that is installed in the lobby and within view of all visitors. The software communicates with the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) over a Modbus TCP/IP network while a VPN (virtual private network) link is used to collect information from the tanks in the house's other fermentation cellars. Fourteen fermentation modules are housed in the main cellar in Reims and four others are located in various towns across the Champagne vineyard at distances of 30 to 200 km from the main cellar! The VPN saves a tremendous amount of time. "Being able to supervise all our fermentation cellars from one place eliminates the need to drive to each cellar. The supervision system issues an alert if a serious temperature control issue crops up," says Stéphane Fournier.

Mr Jendryka can now monitor all his tanks from his desktop PC. "PcVue supervisor has made our fermentation cellars smart. We can monitor every aspect of temperature control from just one place."

Encouraged by this positive experience, Veuve Clicquot's technical teams quickly realised how PcVue could be used elsewhere. Not only does it supervise the fermentation of wine in the tanks, it also monitors the production of cold during cold stabilisation after final blending.

PcVue does not control these operations; it is used simply to view their settings and archive, log and track temperatures, faults and other data. It is also used for effluent monitoring purposes at the two treatment plants – it manages acid and sodium-hydroxide levels, tracks pH and flow-rate values (weekly dashboard report for Dreal, the regional directorate for the environment, land-use planning and housing) – and to e-mail resupply alerts to the managers when levels become low.

And that's not all! PcVue is being deployed to other areas of Veuve Clicquot's operations. By the end of the year it will be running on the wrapping line (placement of foil capsules and labels on bottles prior to shipment). "We are going to use it in particular to retrieve production orders from SAP and provide the laser ID to be affixed onto the glass and back-label," says Mr Jendryka.