Monitoring & metering Smart water monitoring
Providing high quality water supplies is an essential service delivered by municipal authorities and utility companies around the world. Maintaining water quality requires constant monitoring and testing to ensure accurate measurements are being taken. Traditionally this has involved time- consuming calibration and maintenance. A council in New South Wales, Australia, however, has decided to do things differently and turned to Bürkert for an automated precision monitoring solution
to the Kempsey District, 350 km north of Sydney. At the South West Rocks recycled water treatment plant, final treatment of effluent includes ultra-filtration, UV disinfection and the addition of chlorine, all of which are required to achieve the necessary standards of water quality. To ensure that the water quality standards are
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being maintained, the shire council uses a monitoring station, equipped with sensors for measuring pH and chlorine. However, these sensors use reagents to establish the measurements and as an ageing system, it was becoming unreliable and required a lot of maintenance. Of greater concern was the fall-off in accuracy and the need for more frequent recalibration, which required increasing levels of operator intervention.
IMProvINg AccurAcy Michael Coleman, area sales manager for Bürkert, takes up the story: “We were in the process of looking at potential markets for one of our latest innovations and happened to be talking to representatives at the treatment works. We had an opportunity to discuss the features and benefits of
he Kempsey Shire Council is a local government utility that is responsible for providing water and wastewater services
our Online Analysis System Type 8905 for water at a time when they were experiencing a few issues with their own installation.” Following the initial approach, alternative systems
were also considered and compared to Bürkert’s solution. However, several benefits stood out, not least the significant improvement in accuracy and the huge reduction in maintenance. Tristan Nowland, an instrument technician, who
has been involved in the installation and operation of the new water analysis system, reflects on the depth of Bürkert expertise: “I liked being able to talk with their water industry specialists and local engineers at any time when I had specific questions, and felt comfortable that Bürkert were confident in their knowledge of the system and my application needs.” Data accuracy and the minimal drift of results
is very important in establishing water quality standards and ensuring that local and federal legislation is being met. Proving the capabilities of a monitoring system in a demanding recycled water treatment plant can take time. Therefore, the treatment works decided to install three Bürkert water quality analysis systems for performance evaluation.
FlexIBle INSTAllATIoN One of the first advantages was the compact modular design of the system that makes it very flexible in terms of installation. The component parts consist of an integrated HMI display, input/output modules, sensor cubes and a cleaning system, all of which can be wall or panel mounted, and in Kempsey’s case, built into an existing cabinet. Once installed, the individual sensor modules
or ‘cubes’ are essentially ‘plug and play’ on a dedicated backplane, which meant the engineers from the treatment works soon had the complete system functioning effectively. There is a simple process to set up the alarm parameters for each sensor cube, ensuring that any anomaly in the process is identified quickly. Greg Morrow, instrument technician at the
South West Rocks plant, comments: “We are very pleased with the new system. Since it was installed, there has been no need to recalibrate the chlorine or the pH sensor cubes and their performance has been verified using portable laboratory equipment such as a DPD1 photometer reference test for free chlorine. Furthermore, the sensors’ response
40 August 2019 Instrumentation Monthly
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