Ensuring a clean, oxygenated aquatic environment is essential to the health and well being of the many priceless sea creatures at Durban's billion rand tourism destination, uShaka Marine World. To maintain the tank levels and optimum water ozone conditions, uShaka's aquarium and dolphinarium rely on Adroit supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) software to provide overall visualisation, monitoring and alarming for its almost 40 different marine life support systems.
uShaka is ranked the fifth largest aquarium in the world by water volume - which is no surprise when taking into account the extent of the marine exhibits and displays that form the heart of this expansive facility.
Featured amongst the many indoor and outdoor salt water displays are the 1200-seater dolphin stadium, the seal enclosure, deep ocean dwellers exhibit, interactive snorkelling, diving and touch pools, penguin rookery, coral gardens and the enormous encased, walk-through dangers of the deep display brimming with sharks, sea snakes and other spine chilling fascinations.
Coupled with manual pH inspections, uShaka monitors the cleanliness, sterility and clarity of the water vis-á-vis the Adroit scada system. The oxygen reduction potential (ORP) centres located in the water inlet pipes provide key-measures on the amount of ozone contained in the water. These millivolt readings are converted and fed back to the scada system via the extensive system of Klöckner Moeller programmable logic controller (PLC) and the Profibus network.
Each of the almost 40 life support systems has its own PLC which feeds data back to two primary PLCs, which filter the readings from the ORP centres to the scada system where the data can be monitored.
The Adroit system is maintained in a central control room on a single workstation. Future plans exist to link the scada to the uShaka intranet, providing remote access for Vernon Hellyer, uShaka Sea World's technical manager and other key operations personnel.
The low level alarming functionality of the Adroit system forms an integral part of uShaka Sea World's early warning system. As the facility does not have a 24-hour scada operator, the onscreen alarm is supplemented by an audible siren that can be heard from anywhere in the complex ensuring that optimum water levels and ozone content are maintained at all times.
Hellyer reports that the Adroit system is simple to operate, and enjoys the ease with which he can retrieve data from the system. He uses the scada's trending functionality to draw daily reports from the ORP centres as well as information on the alarms detonated.
"Adroit is the Rolls Royce of scadas and we hope to utilise more of its functionality in the future as funds become available to link our extensive existing infrastructure of field monitoring equipment and software to the system," says Hellyer.
For more information contact Megan Davidson, marketing, Adroit Technologies, 011 658 8100, [email protected], www.adroit.co.za
| Tel: | +27 11 658 8100 |
| Fax: | +27 11 658 8101 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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