The City of Riverside, CA Wastewater Treatment Plant serves a thriving mid-sized metropolitan area, located just east of Los Angeles. The average daily flow is 35million gallons of wastewater per day to be processed, including elevation changes of 1,000 feet across the plant’s service area, with more than 500 feet of elevation changes within the facility itself, which can make communication with the system’s 22 lift stations, including 2 major lift stations, problematic. In addition, the wastewater treatment plant also manages the co-generation facility that produces 3.3 MW of electric power and the City’s closed landfill operation. In short, the plant’s operations are detailed, complex and the continued smooth operation of the facility is important to both the community and the local environment.

“We have the same issues to face as any other wastewater treatment plant,” says Steve Schultz, the City of Riverside’s Wastewater Systems Manager. “In particular, we have a limited reserve of funding and we try to tackle some of the facility expansion with internal staff whenever possible. Here at the plant, we have no on-site IT support, but we have major issues that we’re addressing.”

After Schultz arrived in Riverside in 2002, he began to realize that the plant’s SCADA operations were disjointed, with up to five different systems running at one time. With multiple operating systems involved coordination and maintenance was difficult and expensive. Changes and updates to one system were often not replicated on other systems. As a consequence, SCADA operations could best be described as disparate, unconnected and often unreliable. Loss of data was not uncommon, and presented a significant problem for a facility with several critical reporting requirements.

Emory Scriven, Project Manager for WaterHammer, Inc. consulted with City of Riverside and described the problem this way: “We had around 15 stand-alone PCs throughout the plant, with each of them running Wonderware’s InTouch HMI, with data being captured to Industrial SQL servers. With all of the problems of continual updates, new service packs, and new drivers, there were naturally high maintenance costs. On top of that, the plant infrastructure included some systems running Windows NT, others Windows 2000 and even Windows 2003 and we needed to stabilize that. Between the co-generation facility, the water treatment areas, the lift stations and the landfill, this facility had five different systems running at one time.

“We’re responsible for collecting data for the facility and our NPDES (National Pollution Discharge Elimination System) permit. Previously, when we shut down we stood a chance of losing data and there were times we did just that. Just the ability to move information from one treatment process to another area within the facility was problematic,” said Schultz. Following a lengthy process to thoroughly understand the SCADA’s system’s performance over all areas of the plant, Schultz and his team began in 2004 to implement a project to fix all of the problem areas.

“We wanted a system with a centralized server and a more economical way to view the system from within the plant. Where I worked before in San Bernardino, CA, we had brought in the Thin Client system and it seemed to be what we needed here,” said Schultz. And once again, ACP's ThinManager provided exactly what was required.

ACP's Thin Client management and enabling software, ThinManager, allowed the City of Riverside to focus on the process, not fight with computers. Additionally ThinManager helps the City of Riverside manage their Terminal Servers from within the same user interface that they use to manage all of the Thin Clients.

By replacing failure prone PCs with ThinManager Ready Thin Clients the staff was able to greatly simplify their daily operations and reduce costs. And the fact that the Thin Clients have no moving parts and no local storage means improved reliability and reduced downtime. ThinManager Ready Thin Clients have no local applications, so adding new interfaces is as easy as plugging in another Thin Client and turning it on, giving them immediate access to all of their existing software and data. This ease of expansion gave them a way to plan for the future.

Schultz and his team decided to implement a program to install fiber optic cable wherever it was needed or deemed useful, and then began to install a central server system using Thin Clients. “We’ve been able to move from 15 machines spread out across the facility down to six, and they’re all in one central location. Our new system features two terminal servers, 2 historians and two I/O servers in a redundant system,” he said.

Going forward, Schultz and his team are considering the addition of the LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) to the SCADA system. “From the beginning,” said Schultz, “our philosophy was to do the work and manage as much of the process as we were able. We had some outside help in guiding us, but everything we installed was intended to be done by staff so that we would really know what we have, and that ultimately we would help have much better control over our SCADA system in the future.”

Summing up, Scriven added, “The move to Thin Client technology makes the development cycle shorter, lowers costs, gives us improved reliability and with the ACP ThinManager Ready Thin Clients redundancy is built-in. We can now do development work from any terminal, and Thin Clients give us the flexibility to install nodes wherever there’s fiber optic cable available. With Thin Clients and ThinManager, we can focus on the controls and instrumentation side of the SCADA system, as opposed to just setting up and working with PCs.