Faure water treatment plant, the most sophisticated plant of its sort in the Southern Hemisphere and the flagship of the Cape Metropolitan Council’s (CMC) water treatment facilities, installed the Adroit Technologies scada HMI. Faure has a design capacity to process 500 megalitres per day, and currently sources and treats between 200 and 400 megalitres from Riviersandend and from Furlands pump station at the Steenbras Dam and distributes it to reservoirs in the area.
Systems integrators, Leaders Electrical Consulting, installed this system, which set the standard for water treatment in the Cape. Adroit currently operates at Steenbras, Blackheath, Wemmershoek, Constantia, Kloofnek, Brookland, Voëlvlei and Atlantis, as well as at various pump stations and water sewerage treatment plants in the Cape Metropolitan Council area. Owner Rob le Roux comments, "After installing the system at Faure, it became the standard in the Cape because of its simplicity and ease of use. Adroit is easy to understand and comes complete with development package, standard drivers and all the tools necessary to fully configure the system making it simple to install and price competitive."
Faure is the largest Adroit scada HMI installation in the CMC stable. The system monitors and controls 30 Modicon PLCs on a Modbus+ system and has 13 800 real scan points.
Plant managers and operators are able to receive per second reporting on the plants pumps, valves, chemical dosing, system filtration, turbine control, line conveying system, ferric and carbon dioxide dosing as well as powder activated carbon (PAC), pre and post chlorination and controls all water related devices.
The Adroit scada at Faure works in a ring type system running clockwise to anticlockwise, for purposes of redundancy. Should the network break, information is simply rerouted in the opposite direction. Faure has a hot standby system using Adroit's Active Clusters, the client and server redundancy is completely automated without having to generate complex scripting routines or purchase additional software. In Adroit, a cluster is a set of two or more servers running a replicated database, with all I/O and client tasks serviced by a nominated master server while the standby server replicates the master. If the master fails, one of the standby servers takes over as the master. As the scan tasks and client tasks always track the master, these tasks connect as appropriate.
Data catch-up, replication and switchover are completely automated, allowing failed servers to be brought back into the cluster or new servers to be added at any time. Adroit updates all information to the current cluster state, including datalog files.
Faure originally operated on a Turbolink system that warranted a multilink upgrade to enhance all system functions (Adroit's DOS based predecessors). The CMC recognised a need to generate more extensive plant reports which Adroit facilitated by setting up historical and realtime trending reports in the same trend window, allowing for up to eight variables.
Windows NT is a simple systems interface that provides a secure audit trail of events such as operator actions, alarm events, system events, logon/logoff events and more. The central control station distributes information to the 5 nodes purchased (of which four run concurrently) and the dozen or so offices. All controls, including that of a cold standby system housed in the plants remote centrifuge station, are performed via the Adroit scada. The main servers are utilised purely for the scada system and reporting mapping to an MS Access database. Adroit offers increased data throughput and program responsiveness when logging to very large databases.
Leaders Consulting designed over 100 mimic screens, using Adroit's online vector-based drawing tools that make graphics simple to use for SIs - and easy to understand for plant operators.
Leaders Consulting also designed a plethora of scripts using Visual Basic to manage User Interface operation and automate complex tasks, and designed a system they call Power Management, which controls the amount and the way in which electricity is used in a 24 hour period. Future plans include linking to the plant maintenance system via OLE in order to collect a more comprehensive range of the operations data for predictive maintenance. CMC has also purchased SAP, which the system will integrate with for management reporting and control.
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| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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