Burbank Water Reclamation Plant Control System

Burbank, CA

PACE was hired by United Water to evaluate and troubleshoot the existing aeration control system and WAS valving for the City of Burbank’s 12.0 MGD treatment facility.  Although the City had electric valve controls for each of the four aeration trains and three 400 HP blowers, the control system only allowed manual actuation of these components.  In addition, the WAS process piping also needed replacement due to corrosion.  In our evaluation, PACE determined the existing hardware could be reused, which reduced upfront capital costs. PACE also provided the programming and integration of the PLCs, HMIs and plant-wide SCADA systems to completely automate the control of DO and WAS wasting in the basins, greatly reducing energy consumption at the facility. A straight-forward programming approach was applied making the system simple to operate and resulted in effectively controlling DO within 5% of the goal set point and lowered operational output pressure of blowers, reducing energy input by 15%.