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Miranda Whiteard

City of Round Rock, TX

SCADA Specialist, Water Treatment Plant

Miranda Whiteard

Miranda is the SCADA Specialist for the Water Treatment Plant and Water Distribution at the City of Round Rock. With receiving my college degree in Instrumentation/controls, I have been in this field of work for 8 years employed with the city. I develop and modify PLC programming that implements into our SCADA system to utilize modern technology to control our utility system. I enjoy the challenges and rewards this field of work brings and look forward to being a part of the dynamic system controls the future brings.

Presentations

City of Round Rock, Texas Future Proofs IT’s SCADA System: Successes in Modernizing a WTP SCADA and Telemetry System

The City of Round Rock, Texas owns and operates a 52 MGD water treatment facility, located just North of Austin, Texas. The operation centers control over 45 remote sites, including raw water storage, pumping pressure zones, and elevated storage tanks, as well as the treatment facility. The Plant has been expanded over the years with several phases of pretreatment, filtration, chemical feed, and high and low zone pumping systems, and the control system has been added on during each phase, but largely consisted of older Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) processors with multiple remote Input/Output (I/O) racks. Parts for these PLC systems were beginning to become a challenge, and the proprietary architecture meant a single processor failure could affect many processes. The Human Machine Interface (HMI) also was beginning to show its age, and the annual software license costs were becoming prohibitive, and operations staff were longing for a more user-friendly and efficient graphics system that was easier to navigate.

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