Last fall, City Corporation, the water and wastewater utility for Russellville, Arkansas, replaced a failed legacy PLC (programmable logic controller) with advanced automation hardware from Bedrock™.
Brown Engineers helped City Corporation become the first municipal utility to transition to this new level of cyber security and performance. Several others are hoping to be the next Bedrock installation in Arkansas, given the growing threat of cyber attacks.
Unlike other PLC’s, the Bedrock™ controller features a pinless, electromagnetic backplane, which eliminates pin breakage and corrosion, improves reliability and performance, and enables embedded security measures that prevent the use of counterfeit I/O modules.
Bedrock’s military-grade secure operating system further embeds security into the utility’s software and firmware.
Simplicity is another benefit: the entire Bedrock™ catalog only has a dozen part numbers, reducing installation, inventory and maintenance costs. It is scalable for advanced functions like RTU (Remote Transfer Units) or DCS (Distributed Controls Systems).
Six months later, City Corporation General Manager Steve Mallett, Jr., PE remains very happy with the change to Bedrock™. “The PLCs running automatic control of our digestion blowers, clarifiers, sludge pumps and chlorination chemical feed pumps have become obsolete. So when one of them failed, we wanted to replace it with something that would provide a path to the future.”
Mallett adds, “With its high performance and increasingly important built-in cyber security protection, the Bedrock system offers that, and it has been running without issue since installed. We are very pleased with the decision to go with Bedrock.”
Dee Brown, principal in charge of the upgrade, finds growing interest in cyber security among municipal utilities. “Many want to control security functions from their tablets and control centers, because their networks are getting hammered every day by probes and attempted intrusions.”
Brown adds, “the Bedrock controller gives them another layer of protection beyond firewalls and VPNs. It is unique in that as it powers up, it checks to be sure that all hardware and software components are validated. Regular PLCs just can’t do that.”
