Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District
As part of the efforts by the MSD Pump Station division to move towards predictive maintenance strategies at critical facility locations, EDCS designed a communications backbone system for MSD’s master lift pump stations. The primary goal of this project was to design a communication backbone at four master lift pump stations to connect the data collected at the pump stations to the GE iFIX historian at Lemay Pump Station No. 1 as well as provide short-term data logging capability at each station. In addition, this project addressed expansion of the communications backbone and how a similar installation may be repeated for other pump stations in the future.
After considering several technologies, the focus for communication transmission on this project was chosen to be distributed cellular communications. The cellular communication hardware was selected to connect with the existing SCADA hardware at each lift pump station. EDCS performed site visits, coordinated with pump station staff and cell service providers, produced a preliminary design report, calculated cost estimates, and created construction drawings and specifications.