Edge Control Technology Brings Digital Transformation to Water Treatment and Distribution

 The combination of aging infrastructure, loss of expertise in staff, and special strains such as that posed by COVID-19, is driving water treatment and distribution system operators worldwide to seek out digital transformation as a way to gather and manage data so as to significantly improve operations. Operators need workforce availability, remote operations capability, and faster responses to breakdowns or a way to avoid them altogether, and they need these solutions now, not in some distant digital future.

In an important article in Water & Wastes Digest entitled, “Digital Transformation is the Path to Smart Water Operations,” Emerson’s Manish Sharma outlines the essential nature of edge controller technology as a way for water professionals to achieve digital transformation now.

According to Sharma, each facility needs to develop a process to:

  • Monitor: Know the current system state
  • Diagnose: Understand causes and effects
  • Predict: Use the information to predict and avoid problems like equipment breakdowns or critical process deviations
  • Optimize: Use the information to improve efficiency
  • Learn: Learn how to forecast operational behaviors

Sharma says, “It has long been possible to stitch together a variety of instruments, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), I/O, networking, and computer software to gather data for analysis. But it is difficult to design, operate, and maintain these conglomerations of parts and technologies, especially considering the geographic spread of many water operations.

“This is why newly available edge controllers are a better choice to implement digital transformation of water processing and distribution operations. Edge controllers are robust industrial devices much like PLCs. The key is that they are really two systems in one – using hardware virtualization to create a deterministic real-time controller in parallel with a general-purpose operating system like Linux. The deterministic and general-purpose systems operate independently but in parallel, and they can securely communicate via industry standard OPC UA.”

In the article, Sharma outlines creation of a smart water philosophy and takes readers through the steps of creating a working system. Read the entire article here.

What are you using as your pathway to digital transformation?

More information on Emerson’s industrial edge computing and control solutions can be found here.