Originally posted by MSA
If you work in the water/wastewater industry, we don’t have to tell you just how dangerous treatment plants can be for worker well-being. We also don’t have to explain that water/wastewater plants have an even greater potential for danger after hours and on weekends when no one is physically on site.
What you may not realize, though, is how advancements in safety technologies, namely IIoT or Industrial Internet of Things solutions, have made it easier and more economical to monitor and manage toxic gases and other critical factors and ensure safety.
Here are two specific technology-based tools that can make a real difference:
Nothing is more important than protecting water/wastewater facilities and workers against fire and explosion hazards. And the NFPA 820 Standard for Fire Protection in water/wastewater treatment and collection facilities is the de facto guide to help ensure protection.
Which is why Fixed Gas and Flame Detection or FGFD solutions are an essential part of that protection. Combine durable, dependable devices with smart technologies and water/wastewater treatment plants can enjoy operational autonomy and increase safety and efficiency.
To illustrate what we mean, let’s look at a real-world application featuring a customer of ours. Even though this particular customer is in a different industry, they had constructed a potentially dangerous hydrogen production plant. As such, they needed a way to monitor their operation for hazardous gas leaks, reliably and remotely. Moreover, they asked that the solution facilitate communicate with the rest of their system.
You can read their full story here, but the point of it is this:
They needed a plug-and-play solution that could connect to and integrate their MSA FGFD products, giving them full visibility and control of their FGFD detectors. The same can be done for water/wastewater treatment plants with help from MSA FieldServer gateways.
If you’ve got a high gas alarm in a water/wastewater treatment facility, you’ve got a problem. With an IIoT solution like the MSA FieldServer FGFD ProtoAir Gateway, you can get instant remote monitoring capabilities for all MSA FGFD devices, as well as those from other manufacturers.
Even better, when integrated with the MSA Grid, FieldServer enables Cloud-based alarm notifications for full transparency into the life safety system.
That means those who need to know what’s going will get an SMS or email notification whenever a trouble or alarm condition is triggered, providing the necessary insight to determine if it’s a false alarm or something else that needs immediate action.
FGFD for the Water/Wastewater Industry
We’ve written before about smarter wastewater treatment and how a Cloud-based solution can help ensure that water/wastewater facilities are monitored 24/7, with or without on-site workers. But one of the greatest enablers that Cloud technologies offer is the ability to enhance the value of data to help:
- Reduce costs
- Boost productivity
- Improve uptime
- Maximize efficiencies
As an example, FieldServer helped a wastewater treatment plant monitor all their fire safety conditions at each of their multiple wastewater plants—and do so from a COMC or Central Operations Monitoring Center.
Not only did FieldServer help eliminate the plague of constant false alarms, it also saved a facility from having to respond to false alarms with expensive manpower dispatches and unnecessary shutdowns.