Project Introduction:
Industrial wastewater is one of the key contamination sources in the pollution of water. With the rapid economic development, a huge amount of industrial wastewater has been discharged in to rivers, lakes and coastal areas during the last century and caused serious pollution and brought negative effects upon the eco-system and human life. This has resulted in many governments taking action to prevent, control and abate water pollution, thereby promoting the environmental monitoring industry to accelerate its transformation and upgrade. Compared to the accustomed method of examining wastewater discharge by manually sampling once every six months, there are more and more requirements for gathering real-time and long-term data so as to improve the effectiveness of monitoring.

System Requirements:
One of the major companies in China which specializes in automatic control technology of environmental protection plans to upgrade its system to on-line monitoring for wastewater quality so as to improve the degree of automated wastewater quality monitoring and reduce errors in measurement. In order to monitor water quality with early warnings, the new solution has to provide continuous and automatic monitoring by using an accurate data acquisition module and robust embedded computer.

There are many types of industrial wastewater based on different industries and contaminants therefore monitoring system must be designed specifically for the particular type of effluent produced and cover a wide range of measuring parameters. Consequently, the related hardware devices have to have a wide array of IO ports to connect various meters and analyzers. Meanwhile, SCADA software is also a basic requirement to provide remote control with the best human-machine interface for technicians.

System Description:
For system reliability, Advantech proposed a total solution, including hardware and software products to guarantee failure-free reliable and accurate measurements. First of all, an analog input module, ADAM-4017 with isolation protection offers the assurance of stable operation while collects a variety of signals from water quality analyzers and PH/Temperature/Conductivity/DO/Turbidity meter. Secondly, UNO, a DIN-rail and high performance automation computer with rugged design is in charge of processing these raw materials and sending them to the central servers in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and enterprise’s monitoring room. As for the computers in control centers, simultaneously receiving the on-site data enables technicians or supervisors to continuously monitor the current water quality status through Advantech WebAccess, an HMI/SCADA software that features animated graphics displays, real-time data control, trends, alarms and logs.

Project Implementation:

System Diagram:

Conclusions:
Compared to other solution providers, Advantech offers ruggedized hardware products with low failure rates for industrial wastewater monitoring systems to ensure best measuring results. In addition, this on-line monitoring system can increase productivity and reduce labor costs through Advantech’s real-time data acquisition and SCADA software to remote control and management. With such benefits, Advantech’s solution is not only an idea choice for this case but also welcomed by the market.