Endress+Hauser reduces costs…wirelessly

It’s well known that the water industry faces ever-increasing monitoring requirements and a growing need to supply regulatory data, making rising costs seem inevitable. Surprisingly, however, water companies are finding that they can actually reduce costs and increase monitoring capabilities by investing in the latest wireless technology.

The cost implications of adding additional measurement points within a water or wastewater treatment plant can extend far beyond the cost of the instrumentation itself. Whilst factors such as maintenance, consumables or civil alterations to accommodate the instrument need to be considered, often the largest cost comes from the need to provide cabling to the device to power it and communicate the output signal back into a data collection system or SCADA. In addition, a number of applications have other influencing factors that make the provision of cables for power and signals very difficult. Just imagine the complexity of running a cable onto a revolving scraper bridge for an instrument that measures the sludge level in a settlement tank. The engineering challenge alone makes implementation of this measuring point all but impossible to retrofit using traditional wired technology.

The Endress+Hauser solution to such problems is a WirelessHART system. This incorporates WirelessHART adaptors that can be fitted to any standard HART device and a WirelessHART gateway to collect the measurement and status information, relaying this data back to a local or remote host system. The adaptors can power any 4-20mA or HART devices that are used to measure parameters such as level, pressure, temperature or flow. They can even be used alongside analysis equipment where, for a typical analyser solution, a comparison of the overall wireless project costs with a conventional wired project approach indicates savings of between 25% and 45%!

The Network and Security Manager software included within the WirelessHART gateway provides a self-organising and self-healing mesh network that starts with three devices and is scalable up to 250 devices per gateway. Utilising the WirelessHART protocol, the gateway has robust security and authentication systems that follow open standards to provide a secure and reliable data network.

As the system is self-organising, the set-up is extremely simple, just turn everything on and wait for the network to establish itself, identify all adaptors and synchronise their communications. Data is mapped from the gateway into the host system using familiar open protocols such as Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP-IP or OPC. Additional instruments can easily be added to the network at any stage and will actually strengthen the mesh, increasing reliability by providing additional redundant paths for data transfers from the devices back to the to the host system.

Contact Endress+Hauser today to find out how much you can save!