4 Ways Automation Tech Improves a Wastewater Treatment Plant

A significant amount of water is not treated in the United States. One of the reasons is that equipment often fails and the pipes often leak. When treatment plants use automation, they reduce the instances of failures and cause more water to receive the treatment it needs. We list the following four ways automation tech improves wastewater treatment below:

1. Increased Quality Control

One thing that an automated system does is ensure that the oxygen in the water is at least as high as the limits of the EPA, but it can also be higher than this limit. In addition to this, the system is your first line of defense against anything that goes wrong. You may not know that anything is wrong in your system as quickly as an automated system can alert you. When this occurs, you only need to go into the automated system’s computer program to fix it. If you need to repair something in the system, you can easily shut it down so that those repairs can take place.

2. Increased Ability to Treat Water

Automation makes it so that you do not need as many workers to operate your water treatment facility, and this causes your water treatment facility to be more efficient. It also increases the amount of water that you can treat at your plant. We can see this in an example of a water treatment plant in Lima, Ohio. Before the plant obtained automation technology, it could only treat 53 million gallons of water per day. After, it could treat 70 million gallons each day. The software also provided the administrators with the ability to visualize the data and take advantage of analysis tools.

The software makes it possible for administrators to know whether or not the plant is doing its job sufficiently. Still, the software lets them do this without requiring a programming or data analysis degree. The fact that the administrators can access this equipment and the data they need without being near the water treatment plan made it possible for the Lima plant to treat more water.

3. Energy Savings

A water treatment plant uses a significant amount of energy, and it can be 40% of the treatment plant’s operating costs. The automated system is so efficient that it senses when water consumption goes up or down, and it decreases or increases the amount of energy the system uses at those points in time. This makes it so that the system only uses the amount of energy that it needs to use at different times of the day.

4. Improve the World

Automation technology is just the beginning. It improves water treatment plant operations, but this leads to improvements in many other industries. As everything improves at the same time, every industry can reduce its costs, fewer emissions will be released into the atmosphere, and everyone will have the clean water that they need.

As automation technology improves wastewater treatment plants, this benefits everyone who needs clean water for drinking and many other reasons.