Process Discharge Monitoring

Industrial cities such as Cleveland, Ohio house manufacturing facilities that produce chemical by-products that must be disposed. To rid themselves of waste, many of these manufacturers have pretreatment systems that clean the waste before dumping the decanted water into city sewers.

To prevent untreated dumping, sewer authorities must monitor the factory discharge for violations of quality standards.

Unfortunately, these plants are dispersed along the sewage grid – it used to be extremely expensive and difficult to integrate the plants in distant locations. As a solution, competitors offered expensive leased lines or licensed radio systems with low reliability, impracticality, and overly-intensive installation. The sewage service looked for better alternatives.

The sewage company found Data-Command. They needed data that could integrate with their historical collection systems, and be easily accessible from any web browser. Additionally, they had to be warned immediately if the manufacturers were dumping illicit materials, and had to be checked at least every minute. And, of course, the entire system had to be inexpensive.

To save the sewer company’s costs, Data-Command connected through many options. Some facilities had DSL, others had cable or T1 lines. Those that didn’t were easily connected through cell services. Data-Command connected all instrumentation through Avid Wireless RTUs, interfaced with flow meters and fluid samplers.

Within only a few weeks, the system was installed. It automatically began wirelessly and flawlessly communicating, and delivering updates every minute to a secure web server.