Flow Measurement & Control


Flow measurement made easy

April 2014 Flow Measurement & Control

The Nantong Water Treatment Company serves the city of Nantong with its population of about 7 million. The company’s Langshan plant pulls water from the Yangtze at a rate of about 600 000 tons per day for treatment. When built in the year 2000, the plant boasted the most advanced and automated water treatment in China.

WaterMaster meters for Nantong plant

ABB products and systems participated heavily towards the plant’s sophisticated reputation. The plant contains an ABB distributed control system (DCS) and 15 ABB electromagnetic flowmeters that measure water flows and chemical dosing throughout the plant.

ABB is now participating in a new project called Chong Plant currently nearing completion. The project will help four nearby cities keep up with the increasing water requirements caused by burgeoning population growth, which will be the recipients of treated water from a giant pumping station nine kilometres from the river intake. An Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) company called Pacific Water, based in Nantong, is managing the control system and instrumentation of the pumping station and its associated wide-ranging piping network.

According to Mr Shaojian, the general manager of the Chonghai Water plant project, it has a capacity of 800 000 tons of water per day and will add 40 new employees to the company’s current 600. “The station’s 12 large pumps will supply 5 million more people residing over an area of 460 square kilometres,” he says.

The new plant chose 28 ABB WaterMaster electromagnetic flowmeters for custody transfer of treated water to the four cities. “One of the main factors in picking ABB WaterMaster magmeters is that the primary sensors are inherently submersible and may simply be buried in the ground,” says Shaojain. “These large meters are installed in 2-metre pipes and they eliminate the necessity of being installed in large, underground concrete enclosures.”

He says that meter installation merely involves excavating to the underground pipe, fitting the primary sensor, cabling the transmitter and then backfilling the hole. “Buried meters result in significant installation savings,” says Shaojian. Once a meter is installed, the company fills the hole with water to make sure its performance is unaffected.

Additionally, the meters are highly accurate, an important attribute for custody transfer operations. An automatic calibration process within the transmitter occurs every 45 seconds without interrupting the flow measurement. Digital Signal Processing (DSP) contributes to the superior accuracy for real-time measurements and maximum reliability. Using DSP, the transmitter separates the real signal from the interference from vibration and hydraulic noise associated with pumping stations.

With the increasing demands and costs for water, the company is also considering the purchase of ABB Aquaprobes, insertion magmeters, to monitor leak detection in the treatment plant. Another possibility is the installation of up to 400 ABB AquaMaster magmeters for direct billing of industrial water users.

The pumping station also includes ABB motors and drives to power the pumps while maximising energy efficiency.

For more information contact Jacolize Goosen, ABB South Africa, +27 (0)10 202 5000, jacolize.goosen@za.abb.com, www.abb.com/za



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