uMhlathuze municipality supplies water and sanitation services to the towns of Empangeni, Richards Bay, eSikhaleni, Ngwelezane, eNseleni, Vulindlela and Felixton as well as the rural areas of Dube, Mkhwanazi, Khoza and Madlebe. Systems integrator, SSE KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), installed one of South Africa's most advanced telemetry solutions and an Adroit Supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) system to enable the uMhlathuze Council to profile the quality of all water resources.
The project commenced in January 2007 and will continue until 2011 through a service level agreement that entitles the client to repay, risk free, all capital layout expenses for approximately 135 sites while the system is insured and maintained by SSE KZN.
Utilisation of the Adroit Scada trend analysis will enable the Council to predict future changes in the quality of the water resources. Trending is performed for levels, pH, flows, pressures and pump starts with all data being logged for six to 12 month periods.
The system is designed to improve efficiency, determine water losses, decrease downtime and reduce maintenance costs. "Adroit was chosen based on its functionality, viability, user friendliness and local support," says Carlo Shields, regional director for SSE in KwaZulu-Natal.
Specifically, the SSE telemetry and Adroit Scada minimises the resources required for bulk meter reading, proactive waste water overflow alarms, pH monitoring in waste water to prevent corrosion, and a reduction in water losses through realtime reporting of pressures, flow and other variables.
The City of uMhlathuze, situated on the north-east coast of KwaZulu-Natal, has a progressive municipality dedicated to achieving a successful balance and synergy between industry, its rich environmental assets and the community. The municipal area has a water pipe infrastructure of 1696 km, reservoir capacities of 240 megaliters, a total of 614 km of sewer pipes and four treatment works which process approximately 100 megalitres per day.
In accordance with the compliance regulations of the WSA, all water services authorities must complete a water services development plan for their area of jurisdiction. This forms part of the integrated development planning process, whose mandate extends to:
* Water quality management.
* Water loss management.
* Bulk meter monitoring including the logging of flows and pressures.
* Water pollution control through the monitoring of waste water treatment works.
* Monitoring and control of water pollution in streams, rivers and boreholes.
* Pump stations and sewer overflows.
Process data for all aspects of the council's water plan is gathered from ultrasonic level transmitters, submersible transducers, water meters, pressure transducers and pH meters. The remote data is sent by the SSE telemetry equipment to the Adroit scada servers situated at the uMhlathuze municipal building. Here it is graphically displayed, analysed, logged and managed.
SSE KZN also installed OPUS reporting software to automatically generate daily reports that are e-mailed to all the responsible parties as well as enabling user access to reports via the web. The system currently has 65 remote terminal units installed that connect through an OPC server with the scada through the standard OPC client driver.
Two Adroit 6.0.4 servers of 1500 scan points each are in use; one for monitoring water and the other for sewerage. These servers are running on Windows XP Professional platforms and include 16 view nodes at strategic offices around Richards Bay and Empangeni. Standard Adroit mimics are used for the visual graphics and data publication as well as onscreen alarm indication. In the event of a critical alarm the system automatically notifies the relevant personnel via an SMS.
The uMhlathuze system utilises the Adroit logging functionality and SSE's remote time-stamped logging feature for redundancy and added security measures.
For more information contact Dave Wibberly, Adroit Technologies, +27 (0)11 658 8100, [email protected], www.adroit.co.za
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