NEED OF AUTOMATION IN COMMON EFFLUENT TREATMENT PLANT

Abstract

Common effluent treatment plant (CETP) is used to treat effluents from a cluster of Small & medium scale industrial units. CETP not only helps the industries to control the pollution, but also provides cleaner environment and services to the society. Automation of CETP has many benefits in terms of savings of chemical, energy, O&M cost in addition to generate better quality of treated water. Most of the CETPs in India are operated manually due to cost involved in automation without realizing savings of these long term hidden costs. Advance innovations in technology offers compact and economic tools to automate CETPs. Automation can be implemented at least in the areas where there is a major contribution of the total annual costs. Usage of online measurement devices can also reduce the labour cost since there is no necessity of sampling and testing in laboratory for several quality parameters and to adjust the controls according to that. Treated water quality will also be improved due to the accuracy in measurements of quality parameters and timely control of operation of different equipment’s. Extent of automation which gives the economic benefits can be chosen by doing life cycle cost analysis before selecting any automation scheme. This paper illustrates the need of automation and its advantages in automation of CETPs.