David St. Pierre, with a background in process control, moved from oil refineries to water utilities in 1986. The difference was night and day. More than 30 years later, he still sees a need for the water industry to understand the basics.<\/p>\n
In the early days of David St. Pierre\u2019s career in process control, he had plenty of exposure to old pneumatic systems and single-loop controllers\u2014by the late 1970s in oil refining, there were banks and banks of single-loop controllers. Not unlike what control software does today in a digital format, those controllers had to be precise. \u201cYou want it to work,\u201d St. Pierre says. \u201cIf it fails, you blow up the town.\u201d<\/p>\n
But since moving over to water in 1986, St. Pierre has been amazed at what is lacking in the automation of the industry. \u201cThe difference between making gasoline and controlling water is night and day. It was like taking a step back in time,\u201d he said. Part of the reason for the difference, he contends, is that water is inherently less dangerous than oil and gas. \u201cWater isn\u2019t going to blow up the town. There\u2019s just not this real urgency to get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n
The automation advances that had taken place in the oil and gas industry were missing in water. Now, as executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC) and vice president of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), St. Pierre sees obstacles in three main areas as the water industry tries to make its way into the digital world: automation, system health and labor.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to figure out how to implement true automation in water,\u201d St. Pierre urged industry professionals last month. He was keynoting a day-long workshop in Chicago called Modernizing North American Water Systems in the Digital Age. \u201cIn each city that I go into, they really aren\u2019t applying normal control strategies, which have been tried and true for ages. I see programmers that are starting from scratch on a blank sheet of paper, trying to recreate control systems that already exist in the systems that they\u2019re buying.\u201d<\/p>\n
The water industry needs to get past the idea that it has to do things differently than other industries, and instead embrace just automation fundamentals. \u201cWe think we\u2019re unique. It\u2019s simply not true,\u201d St. Pierre said. \u201cWe need just simple process control implementation\u2014using the physics that you understand and applying it to a system. We need to get to the fundamentals. We need to apply the tried and true.\u201d<\/p>\n
The second set of obstacles come in the area of system health. Though water utilities have a network of systems that should be able to point to problems like lost water pressure in a fire hydrant, for example, the information isn\u2019t getting where it needs to go.<\/p>\n
In a water system in St. Louis, St. Pierre encountered a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that was so complicated, it was of little use. \u201cWe must\u2019ve had 50 different codes to tell you what we were doing out in the field,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAll you had was garbage going in and garbage coming out. There was no way you were going to utilize that system for information management.\u201d<\/p>\n
They set about figuring out what information was truly valuable. \u201cI have to get good information out so it means something to me and helps me advance forward,\u201d St. Pierre said. \u201cWe decided we needed three resolution codes instead of 50.\u201d<\/p>\n
Labor management is a huge aspect of keeping water utilities running efficiently that needs to be brought under control, St. Pierre also said. \u201cAlmost 70 percent of what I spend a year is labor,\u201d he said. \u201cDo you think it\u2019s kind of important to figure how to manage that labor and get value out of that labor? It probably is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using St. Louis as an example again, St. Pierre referenced the pump station group, made up primarily of mechanics and instrumentation folks. \u201cThe mechanics had never worked on a pump,\u201d he explained. \u201cInstead, what were we doing? We were hauling out failed pumps\u2014failures upon failures. It was a very expensive way to do business. If you drove your car that way, you wouldn\u2019t want a car. It\u2019s not really asset management.\u201d So he sent the mechanics to pump school.<\/p>\n
Many water utilities simply need to implement basic asset management, St. Pierre insisted. \u201cThe equipment we have in water is pretty simple equipment. It\u2019s nothing unique\u2014it\u2019s compressors and blowers and pumps. They should have a standard timeframe reference,\u201d he said. Utilizing predictive sensors correctly would also go a long way, he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is such a need in water for the fundamentals. Once you get those fundamentals down, you can start becoming the excellent agencies that we want to be,\u201d St. Pierre concluded. \u201cIf we want to accelerate the advancement of digitalization in water, it\u2019s really all about getting the fundamentals right.\u201d<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.automationworld.com\/embrace-digital-water-needs-tackle-fundamentals\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David St. Pierre, with a background in process control, moved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n