Small Community Installs “Big Time” Controls

Energenecs recently completed an instrumentation and control project for the Village of Yorkville Sanitary Utility District in Wisconsin. We asked Nick Crevcoure, technical sales at Energenecs about this significant upgrade.

Why were they upgrading the plant?

No significant improvements had been completed at the existing wastewater treatment facility in forty years. While the facility generally maintained DNR compliance, the addition of ammonia limits effectively reduced the overall capacity.

They upgraded their plant to an sequencing batch reactor (SBR) system and also updated all of their associated instrumentation, controls and electrical. Short Elliott Hendrickson Inc. (SEH) was the project engineer with Rick Boya who provided the electrical design. Energenecs supplied three new motor control centers (total of 25 vertical sections of custom MCC) with Allen Bradley CompactLogix PLC controls, as well as the main lift station control panel next to the plant.

Our Brad Mentink was the project manager and coordinator for Energenecs. In addition to the typical project details and startup issues for a project of this size, we did encounter a very serious problem with one of the main breakers in the MCC that was tripping when it shouldn’t have. This was the main 800-1000A breaker which provided power to the entire plant. Brad worked with engineers from the manufacturer and determined there was an issue with the breaker supplied by the manufacturer. Brad came up with a solution to rectify the problem, which was approved by the manufacturer. The fact Brad solved this problem basically on an emergency basis is pretty cool, and speaks of our overall technical expertise. Many consulting engineers like to work with us because we are capable of finding a solution quickly, and are not completely reliant on our suppliers for any issues that come up. In addition to supplying and being responsible for all of the motor controls, PLC programming and field instrumentation, Energenecs also configured Wonderware SCADA software, which they did not have at this facility previously.

What were they doing before Wonderware?

They had an alarm dialer which called them when they received an alarm, which required their operators to physically go to the site. They didn’t have software that gave them an overview of the plant. Now they can remote into their SCADA computer and monitor all the different processes/equipment and also see where the alarm is. Jacob Hofman, Energenecs SCADA technician, did the majority of the programming for the Yorkville system. The SCADA software installation was one of the biggest improvements for them.