Customer Application

30 October 2018
Stadtbetrieb Bornheim Relies on a Standardized Measurement System from WAGO and NIVUS

The project, described by those in charge of it as a “mammoth task,” began with the first station, the booster station on Coloniastraße: At the end of 2017, Stadtbetrieb Bornheim began updating the central monitoring and logging system of its own wastewater plant and the waterworks it runs. In the process, it relied on standardized technology developed by WAGO and NIVUS, which plays the role of a maintenance-free IoT gateway in the substations: More than 40 stations are connected to the control center with the PFC200-based NivuLink Control. The centrally installed controller not only controls the processes, but also monitors the system at the same time. According to the empirical values collected so far, the data flow is running smoothly.

“The starting point was the discontinuation of the analog telephone connections for the remote wastewater stations and the technical update that was due. In some cases, some substations would no longer have been usable with the new digital telephony,” explains Wolfgang Hönighausen, technical director of the waterworks. Action was urgently needed, since about half of the wastewater stations are subject to documentation requirements: “The competent supervisory authority demands complete access to our records.” In parallel, the municipal utility company planned to replace the earlier monitoring and recording system and to update the electrical instrumentation and control engineering, the process control technology and the process visualization in the waterworks. “We took over the wastewater plant and management of the waterworks in January of 2013; at that point we lacked complete documentation and were dealing with significant outages, which were also caused by occasionally unstable data connections,” says Hönighausen. This was unacceptable for this Bornheim company, which is responsible for an area of about 83 square kilometers, with a branched sewer system over 200 kilometers long, as well as drinking water and wastewater connections for more than 48,000 residents.

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Wolfgang Hönighausen, technical director of the waterworks managed by Stadtbetrieb Bornheim, is satisfied with the new standardized measurement system from WAGO and NIVUS for comprehensive networking of the systems.

To solve the problem of the unreliable data connection, the people in charge installed a fiber optic network that links the waterworks to the water towers. Wolfgang Hönighausen and Dominik Hupperich, head of wastewater at Stadtbetrieb Bornheim, also had clear ideas about choosing the new central control system – even if it had been technically possible to port the existing wastewater system to the new electrical instrumentation, control engineering and process control technology. “However, that is a very cost-intensive process; we would have had to purchase new substations or replace old ones.” The parameterization would also have required significant time and effort. Last but not least, they also wanted better technical support for the future: “I like to talk to a human on the phone, not a hotline where I have to submit a ticket,” emphasizes Hönighausen.

“We looked as a few vendors’ systems, including NICOS from NIVUS. We’d been familiar with them for many years in the area of measurement technology, primarily in the wastewater sector,” explains Hupperich. In 2016, together with this company from Eppingen, the municipal utility company developed a water loss elimination concept for the territory of the waterworks and provided the corresponding technical equipment for the stilling wells to allow them to track consumption within the water network. “For this purpose, we used the NIVUS D2W (Device to Web) data management system. That project was a positive experience, including the technical support,” emphasizes Hönighausen.