MWRA Water Treatment – Deer Island, Boston, MA
Prior to joining Aztec as the VP of Engineering, James Grace worked as a direct employee of the MWRA. He was a key contributor during the design, programming, testing, commissioning, start-up, and eventual ownership of the ~20,000 I/O $24 million plant wide control system. The control system foundation is a Bailey Infi90 DCS with a redundant fiber-optic network and communicates to a multitude of PLCs from all of the major PLC vendors. Jim worked closely with the lead design engineer (M&E), developing and implementing new advanced control strategies designed to allow the plant to be operated by fewer people, improve plant performance, maximize plant utilization during wet weather flow events, and minimize energy usage during all flow conditions. These advanced control strategies included process/equipment modeling and constraint control based algorithms.