Usage of S88 batch standard in Wastewater treatment plant?

[Karsten]

Has anyone ever used the S88 batch standard in aWastewater treatment plant? References?

 

[TWS]

Municipal waste water plants are continuous processes.
It could work for an industrial non continuous process, like metals recovery.
What are you trying to treat?

 

[Saffa]

If it's an SBR (Sequencing Batch Reactor) type plant then you potentially could I guess? The sequence steps are generally simple enough that I generally just see state machines used to implement these. But, that's probably more just due to a lack of S88 knowledge here outside of food and bev industry.

However as TWS says if it's a conventional, continuous activated sludge process then it may add extra complexity to attempt to fit S88 to this.

 

[Ken Moore]

S88 is best suited to systems that make several different batches and or recipes.
For a process that is always the same sequence, hard coded state machines is what I have seen most often.

 

[parky]

Has to make me laugh, I have been in the food processing for over 40 years S88 was introduced in 1988, never hear of it until about 95, we had a new production director who asked me if we implement S88, I said I would check our systems are to that standard, It turned out that they were, I had been using that sort of standard way before it came out Just makes you think that somewhere there are these thinktanks paid a lot of money to come up with these basically plagiarising work already done by others, I used the "S88" in a form, this was because one of our major customers had developed their own standard in 1979 that was so close to it. Not worth the effort unless you are doing batch/recipe systems, however, there are certain aspects that may be useful but unless your customer insists on it don't bother.

 

[Tom Jenkins]

I've been doing wastewater controls for forty years and never heard of S88 until your post.

 

[Karsten]

Thank you all! Then it is not me being insane. I have never heard of it either.

Customer has been listening too much to some overpaid consultants.

 

[parky]

It's these managers who know nothing but have time to scan the internet & come up with these standards, they don't understand them but want to use them because it's a standard, what they do not know probably like even us, the standards are guidelines not exactly how to write your software, providing the recipe structure, blocks that run during a recipe stage etc. etc. follow the standard then it is S88, The example of one of my customers I posted who had this sort of standard way before it came out, even some software houses who worked for them did not understand it, the Major company supplied standard software that had to be used, not going into details but we also at first struggled putting their software in & getting it to work, fortunately, I found out who wrote it, managed to get a day with him & from that day on it became a little easier, over the following years, I got involved in a number of existing projects done by other preferred suppliers, yes they put the standard software in but then frigged it to make it look like it was doing the job. Turned out as far as we know our system was the only one with the standard software that did what it should.

 

[Paullys50]

While I have not done a wastewater project, I know enough that the concepts of S88 could easily be applied, especially if you are talking about an SBR. After all, batching in F&B utilizes valves, motors, pumps, agitators, vessels, piping and moves liquid product from point A to point B just like in wastewater.

Making Kool-Aid or treating wastewater it's all the same from a control standpoint IMHO.

The biggest value S88 brings in-terms of control have to do with how to identify and breakdown equipment into modular pieces of control (Units, Equipment Modules, Control Modules) and how to break down the process required (Unit procedures, Operations, phases). Common terminology is also a significant advantage (Start, stop, hold, abort, restart...etc).

From an engineering perspective, aligning with S88 gives you the tools and framework to tackle a wide variety of process control systems including "continuous". Despite me not having experience in wastewater, I have the tools to break down the process and create a reasonable control solution.

I assume that even in water/wastewater parameters change and different 'treatments' exist, which could be defined as a "recipe" thus recipe management features of S88 are applicable as well.

- Opinion from an overpaid consultant.

 

[parky]

Paully is sort of right, then again any control system should be broken down into chunks it makes sense, that does not make it S88 though, TBH if a programmer does not break it down into chunks then he is not doing a good job especially nowadays with what ever you want to call them subroutines, AOI, FB's etc.

 

[Paullys50]

...TBH if a programmer does not break it down into chunks then he is not doing a good job...

And what resources are out there to help a programmer do a "good job" of breaking it down into "chunks" should they not know where or how to start?

 

[pegla00]

For the past five years I've been exclusively using S88 procedural model for batch and material handling applications.

Process permissives and interlocks are integrated into visualization of all procedures. Functional descriptions incorporate S88 notation.

For metrics I use S95 (ISA) with timing for modes, states and alarms as per ISA-TR88.00.02.

It took me a couple of years to standardize software and accompanied documents, mostly on my free time.

Considered to be a work in progress.