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Wireless Integration Ensures Wastewater Plant Reaches Its Upgrade Goals
 Upgrading the control system for a municipal wastewater system was going to be costly and time consuming until facilities engineers reviewed available wireless technologies.
The Persigo Waste Water Treatment Plant serves the City of Grand Junction, Colo., and the surrounding communities. The facility, which cost about $28 million, was put into service on Jan. 16, 1984.
After two decades of operation, the existing control infrastructure was in need of replacement and upgrade. Although, it originally had been designed to use the most reliable communications signaling technology available at the time, buried multi-conductor copper cables, age and constant use had heavily degraded the performance. As a result, maintaining the system became expensive... Read more
Navigating “Buy American” Regulations: Taking the Complexity Out of ARRA
 Despite what many people seem to think, “Buy American” is not new. It did not just appear along with the billions of Federal dollars injected into the economy over the past year to help stave off a global depression.
The United States Government has long had a policy for preferring to buy goods and services from American companies rather than their foreign competitors.
Indeed, Buy American has been a regular part of contracting with the US government for decades, so why does it seem so complicated today? The simple answer is that the world has become a complicated place, and without being overly critical or facetious, there is nothing bureaucracy loves more than complexity. It's the same everywhere on the planet and in this case it is making life hard for those people whose livelihoods are dependent on understanding the regulations and how they work... Read more
Choosing the Right Path: Greenboard Controllers or COTS Controllers?
 Once upon a time OEMs only had one approach to planning and commissioning a build project and nowhere in that approach was there a multiple choice option for controller selection.
You had to design and develop your own “green board” based on your technological requirements.
To be sure, this approach has its advantages. For example: a proprietary, custom designed controller will be tightly focused on the project's exact requirements. However, it has its disadvantages too and over the past few years the horizons have broadened and now OEMs can choose between designing their own controllers or adopting commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) controllers from an automation vendor like Siemens Industry, Inc.... Read more
Video Tutorials: Small Controllers Solve Big Challenges
 Part 3 - Adding an HMI to a controller project using Step 7 Basic Software for Simatic S7-1200 Compact Controllers
See how easy it is to integrate HMI screens into the controller user program using the same Step 7 Basic Software for both Simatic Basic HMI panels and S7-1200 Controllers. This is part three of a four part series showcasing the time and cost saving benefits of the new S7-1200 and its Step 7 Basic development software... View now |
