The Jachenhausen Group is an administration union which supplies drinking water to around 15,000 residents in the administrative districts of Lower Bavaria, Upper Bavaria and Upper Palatinate. At the end of 2015, the association expanded their Ihrlerstein waterworks and equipped it with an activated carbon filter system which frees drinking water from foreign matter such as dust, heavy metals or interfering chemicals.

SPANGLER Automation has designed, built and installed automation technology within the scope of this project in Ihrlerstein and at two other locations belonging to the Jachenhausen Group. The Ihrlerstein location has been equipped with an activated carbon filter system; at the Haid location, the administration union has also built an elevated tank, and two well sites have been retrofitted with measuring equipment for pH-values.

Longstanding cooperation

Furthermore, SPANGLER has programmed and implemented the control software, and coordinated its visualisation with the existing control system. The company has installed and commissioned measuring and control technology at all these locations. The retrofitting and expansion of the systems has taken almost eleven months, and all adaptations were completed by the beginning of December 2015. Both partners benefitted from their longstanding cooperation in this project: “We have known the systems concerned since 1998, and were able to complete our work without time-consuming orientation periods,” says Franz Achhammer, key-account sales department at SPANGLER.

The health resort of Bodenmais is one of the leading tourism regions within the Bavarian Forest, and is located in direct proximity to the Bohemian Forest and the border to the Czech Republic. At the beginning of 2016, SPANGLER Automation installed and adapted the new process control system for the local sewage treatment plant.

A particular challenge in this case was to adjust the system conversion and the new user interface during operation so that the accustomed processes could be maintained as far as possible. For this purpose, initially the functions of the existing control system were analysed, all control variables documented and the existing values stored. SPANGLER specialists then transferred the old system, module for module, to the new FlowChief system. Initially, both systems ran in parallel, so that subsequent modifications and customer requests could be entered into the software via remote maintenance.

Automatic data transfer

With the new system, not just the process control of the sewage treatment plant was technically updated to the current state of the art. The greatest customer benefit from this investment is the connection of the operation diary to the DABAY system of the water authority. Up until now, the data was manually exchanged at the end of the year, but now this exchange is executed daily and in a fully-automated manner.

A modification of the sewage system was on the agenda in the Upper Palatinate district town of Neumarkt. Huber SE in Berching, an internationally active specialist for water and wastewater treatment, had installed a two-line screen plant for the pre-treatment of the wastewater, and SPANGLER Automation supplied the control system technology required for operation. The opportunity for the company to prove its competence in their own district town made this order particularly attractive.

The Töging control system specialists planned the system, created the circuit diagram and constructed the control cabinet in cooperation with the Nurnberg Ingenieurbüro Miller (engineering office). “Thanks to joint, detailed discussions with the employees of HUBER SE, a failsafe control system was created. The concept was specified in the form of a control system description and successfully implemented by our PLC programmers,” says Project Manager André Gebauer. HUBER had installed two multi-rake bar screens and equipped both machines with permanent magnet motors. Their efficiency is over 97 percent and therefore fulfils the requirements of the currently highest European efficiency class IE4 – a development stage which will also pose new challenges for SPANGLER in the future.

Energy flow monitored

Overall, the further development of the Neumarkt sewage treatment plant was dominated by efficiency: A level-sensing speed control reduces energy requirements and wear, and a measurement device in the supply line of the electrical supply monitors voltage, current flow and energy consumption. The SPANGLER PLC transmits all status reports and measurement values via Ethernet directly to the control system, so that the system can be remotely monitored without any problems.

In 1999/2000, the Verband (Association) Penzberg south of Lake Starnberg received a new sewage treatment plant. At the end of 2015, a renovation was due after 15 years of operation without problems. SPANGLER Automation updated the existing measurement technology and evaluation units to accord with state of the art technology.

Within only six weeks, the technical rejuvenation of the control cabinets had been planned, developed and implemented. “Together with the operator, we initially selected suitable measurement technology,” says Project Manager Simon Riepl. Considering that there were 35 measuring points distributed across the entire treatment plant, this was a complex process: Ten fill-level measurements and 25 further measurement isolation amplifiers had to be defined and exchanged.

Data made available through digital technology

The careful preparation resulted in an extremely short change-over period: Within just five working days, SPANGLER had converted the control cabinets and measuring points during running operation, and commissioned the new measurement technology together with the customer. “We parameterised the evaluation units on-site according to the conditions prevailing there, and familiarised the customer with these,” says Simon. In the course of this, SPANGLER also updated the existing documentation regarding the control technology and aligned the circuit diagrams which did not contain changes made in the past. In future, the customer will benefit from being able to undertake smaller changes himself in the circuit diagram file handed over by SPANGLER.

Thanks to this highly modern monitoring technology, the measurements and their analysis are now significantly more precise, and therefore the risk of failure has significantly fallen. And should an evaluation unit be replaced, then the operator can simply load the configuration data via a PC – SPANGLER has also handed over this data in digital form.