clean water with flexible communication
Producing drinking water can be a complicated process, but in Halmstad on the Swedish west coast, it is surprisingly easy. In fact, the groundwater from the eskers of Halmstad is so clean that it is possible to use it directly as drinking water. To control the pumps transporting the water from the eskers, Halmstad Municipality uses drives and soft starts from H2flow’s partner in Sweden, CG Drives & Automation. Since they support communication by industrial Ethernet, both soft starts and drives can communicate with different networks in the water stations’ electrical cabinets.
Anybus CompactCom converts the signals from the network in the water station (in this case, Modbus-TCP) and make these signals understandable for the drives and soft starts used to control the pumps.
Prästjorden’s Water Station in Halmstad is one of the 17 water stations supplying Halmstad with drinking water. The water station pumps up 80 cubic meters of water every hour from a depth of 40 meters. The water goes directly into Halmstad’s drinking water without any cleaning at all. All that is added is some sodium in order to raise the water’s pH. However, given the large amounts of water, the sodium adding can be a time-consuming task. Magnus Winberg, Coordinator at Halmstad Municipality explains: “Previously, we had to manually add nine bags of sodium each day. The new pump system handles this automatically, which saves us a lot of work”.
cg drives & automation's products control the pumps
Halmstad’s water system uses approximately 200 soft starters from CG Drives & Automation, making the pumps start and stop smoothly to minimize wear. In addition, 60 drives are used to set the exact engine speed for the pumps. The drives generate substantial power savings since it is possible to set the pump’s revolutions per minute (RPM) instead of running the engine at full speed and throttle the water flow.
“Previously, we had to manually add nine bags of sodium each day. the new pump system handles this automatically, which saves us a lot of work.”
- Magnus Winbergy, Coordinator, Halmstad Municipality
80 cubic meters of water are pumped through the pipes at the Prastjorden Water Station every hour.
Easy networking as well
The 17 pump stations in Halmstad are controlled by different industrial networks. To communicate with these, CG’s drives are delivered with an Anybus module from HMS. This pluggable communication module enables CG’s drives and soft starts to communicate with many different networks. Prästjorden’s Water Station, for example, uses both Modbus- TCP and PROFIBUS to control the different pumps. “The communication modules enable us to connect our products to several different networks,” says Lars-Olof Pejner, who is CG Drives & Automation’s account manager for Halmstad Municipality. “The communication modules also make it easier for the system integrators when installing the products in the electrical cabinets.”