At one of the largest wastewater treatment plants in the world, DC Water’s Blue Plains Plant’s Process Engineering Maintenance Group has a crucial responsibility of calibrating over 1,000 instruments to help ensure proper water treatment. The Beamex Integrated Calibration Solution, comprised of Beamex equipment and software, they have improved quality and accuracy implementing an automated calibration program. In result, they have achieved a 75% time savings on the entire pressure calibration process. Furthermore, using the Beamex MC6 field calibrator and communicator for pressure calibrations has decreased the time it takes to conduct the calibration procedure itself in the field by over 80%.
With the control system expansion and upgrades, there was a need for calibrating more instrumentation, competently calibrating smart transmitters with higher accuracy, and most importantly, better data for performance reporting was required by the Engineering Group. The Maintenance Group needed to make substantial improvements to the calibration program to accomplish these objectives while keeping resources at current levels. A key component for success was automation. They invested in the Beamex integrated calibration solution (ICS) comprised of Beamex CMX calibration software and Beamex MC6 advanced field calibrator and communicator, and pumps.
A foundation to the solution was defining and documenting the calibration procedures for all calibratable assets into a database inside of the Beamex CMX software. These centralized and well-defined procedures could now drive methods that ensured measurement data is captured, measurement errors are calculated and compared to defined tolerances, and data is organized for easy access and reporting. Building information assets provided the Engineering Group the information they needed for analysis, and the transparency and visibility greatly increased confidence levels for both upper management and third party stakeholders.
Through automated calibration, DC Water has been able to meet the increasing requirements associated with control system upgrades and evolving compliance. Implementing a paperless solution enabled the automation of manual work processes and these streamlined workflows enables them to accomplish more work with the same or less resources with a total return on their investment within the first year.