Challenge

Wine consumption in the United States has increased annually over the past ten years. In 2020, the United States alone consumed one billion gallons of wine.[1] The increased demand for wine has amplified the need for technologies to manage wastewater treatments during the winemaking process. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems play an important role in this process by monitoring and analyzing real-time data to address system problems and keep operations running smoothly. When one of the world’s largest wineries needed to address data collection and operational issues at their wastewater facility, E Tech Group was engaged to make their process more sustainable from their existing infrastructure.

Solution

The wastewater process required a large quantity of process data to be routinely sampled and the size of the facility, coupled with the number of sampling tasks, often took operators away from the control screens. This reduced their ability to access up-to-date, manageable information on potential operational problems. E Tech Group’s Senior Controls Engineers determined that the success of this project would rely on centralizing the existing equipment, upgrading to a new SCADA system, and planning for future growth.

The E Tech Group team upgraded the winery’s SCADA system with the ability to notify operators of different priorities of alarms by leveraging their existing FactoryTalk View SE Distributed application. WIN911 software that delivers critical alarms and alerts in real-time was connected to the facility’s FactoryTalk Alarm & Events to notify operators of potential operation issues without requiring duplicated databases.  Once installed, an operator could effortlessly receive push alarm notifications through an app on their mobile phone. This allowed the operators to complete routine tasks throughout the facility without the worry of missing critical alarms while away from the control screens.

Results

“Had the facility not been equipped with a SCADA system that was capable of this type of expansion, the controls strategies that now exist would not have been possible and may not have allowed the engineering team to address the process issues” explains a Technical Manager at E Tech Group. This amplifies the importance of long-term infrastructure planning and choosing the right system that can grow with a facility.  With a SCADA system investment, the opportunities to control efficiency and mitigate downtime can foster a significant advantage over other manufacturing and processing competitors.

1] Wine Institute. (2022) US Wine Consumption. Wine Statistics. https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/us-wine-consumption/