Leading technology makes new business field possible
Adriatica Acque Srl
Italy has rich water resources and the lowest water prices in Europe, but the country is still Europe’s number one and world-wide number two regarding mineral water consumption. Although countless analyses in 2010 have shown that the limits as per D.Lgs 31/2001 have been met nearly everywhere with 99.8, tap water has a bad reputation.
Therefore, every Italian family spends 234 Euros per year for bottled water according to the study Censis 2014. The savings and environmental protection potential hiding behind this is much higher since 12 billion litres of mineral water have been bottled in PET bottles in 2006 already. This has caused a consumption of 665,000 tons of oil what corresponds to a CO2 equivalent of 910,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. 248,000 tons of PET bottles ended up in residual waste since only 1/3 of the bottles have been recycled.
The data communication infrastructure for setting up public water dispensers – similar to the fountains in towns and villages in former times – had the following requirements:
The water supplier Adriatica Acque from Savignano sul Rubicone (Italy) equips the whole Emilia Romagna and neighbouring regions with public water dispensers, the “Casette dell´acqua”. Our partner EFA Automazione from Cernusco sul Naviglio takes care of the data connection with the INSYS Smart Device IMON-G200.
The IMON-G200 is connected via Modbus RTU (RS485) as master to the SPS AC500 of ABB. It has a Monitoring App for Modbus and queries the flexible addressable Modbus registers of the PLC periodically or event-triggered. Then, it transmits the data via cellular connection and http access to a remote server for visualisation on a PC.
Moreover, the IMON-G200 is prepared for the integration into the icom Connectivity Suite – VPN; a VPN service that facilitates configuration and management of VPN networks significantly – and still guarantees full communication security.
The IMON-G200 has been selected because of its function combination:
Two outputs at the IMON G-200 can be controlled via SMS commands, for example for a remotely triggered reset of the PLC.
Customer
“We have selected the products of EFA and ABB because the excellent quality/price ratio has attracted us at first sight. We have then realised that the performance of the router IMON-G200 and the PLC AC500 have not only met our requirements perfectly, but have allowed us to build the architecture much more complex.
We can visualise now the positive effects on the ecological footprint due to saved oil, not produced PET bottles and reduction of residual waste with publicity effect and in real-time.
At the moment, 2014, we operate 100 water cabins in the whole national territory. This is definitely a growth market and the local authorities issue one invitation to tender for above mentioned implementation after the other. We expect that the structures operated by us double in the next few years.”
Alberto Sebastiani
Head of Sales of Adriatica Acque Srl
Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy
Engineering company
“The integration between PLC and router is quick and easy thanks to the configuration web interface of the IMON-G200 since this is intuitive and practical. After configuring the parameters for Modbus communication in router and PLC, both devices start to exchange information without any problems.
Thanks to the performance of the PLC and the versatility of the INSYS router, we could build the architecture more complex and design processes perfectly.”
Luca Franchini
Engineer and application developer of Ing. Innovative Studio
INSYS-Partner
“We consult our customers before purchase and attend them up to commissioning of the devices supplied by us. And we still stand by you with our service later; of course, the close contact to our supplier INSYS icom helps us with this.
We are very proud on this project, because this preserves the environment significantly and our customer Adriatica Acque was able to develop a new, profitable business field.”
Giorgio Paleari
Head of Sales of EFA Automazione s.r.l.,
20063 Cernusco sul Naviglio, Milan, Italy
www.efa.it