Brushy Creek East, WWTF Early Controls Replacement Project

Plummer is currently working on an expansion to the Brushy Creek East Wastewater Treatment that will upgrade the current facilities from 20-MGD to 30-MGD. The design included a new influent lift station, new primary treatment unit, new aeration basins, new blower facilities, new clarifiers, improvements to the solids handling facilities, 2 new clarifiers, miscellaneous utility improvements, and a new SCADA system. Before construction began, the City of Round Rock, who operates the facility, began having maintenance issues with the existing control system and found that the replacement costs of control equipment would be cost-prohibitive and would be obsolete, little future use capability.

In addition, the SCADA system software licensing upgrade costs would also become non-beneficial as the equipment was due to be upgraded aspart of the expansion project. Plummer proposed a phased control systems upgrade where 5 of the existing process area PLC control panels would be replaced, addressing the most failure-prone and critical areas, thereby eliminating the need to purchase obsolete spare parts and beginning the upgrade of the base SCADA system. This approach allowed a streamlined approach in preparation for the expansion project, minimizing construction shutdowns, and providing spare parts for the rest of the facility during the expansion phase. In some cases additional control functionality to provide additional control redundancy for critical processes.

New SCADA screens for the upgraded process areas were deployed in a parallel fashion, providing a standard Human Machine Interface approach, utilizing high performance graphics, key performance indicators, dashboards, and enhanced trending capabilities. The Ignition SCADA system utilizes fully redundant servers and utilizes a SQL data historian for data storage and high availability. Operators are saving time while after-hours operations staff find the system to be very user-friendly.