Water Treatment Plant

Overview

Customer’s manually operated water treatment plant has a capacity of 66 million litres a day.

The plant has six sections essentially.

• Raw water coming in from the canal
• This raw water is pumped from the canal and stored in huge open raw water tanks
• The raw water then moves into the water treatment plant
• The plants make potable water by purifying through necessary filtration, mixing chlorine, alum, etc.
• Purified water is then pumped and sent to closed clean water tanks
• The clean water is then sent to different pumping stations in the city

Considering there are better ways to operate the plant today, by going for automaton,  The customer wanted to introduce automation and decided to go for a pilot project at one section via clean water tank pumping station.

OpteBiz was entrusted to automate a small area in the clean water tank pumping station on a pilot basis to evaluate the benefits of automation.

Setting up a centralized monitoring station, OpteBiz used a SCADA system with Ignition to deliver their FactoNode and FactoGrid solutions at the clean water tank and automated the process at the clean water tank pumping station.

The clean water tank pumping station is now fully automated without any manual/human intervention. Necessary PLCs, sensors, and equipment have been installed and integrated with the Ignition SCADA for the automation.

Old Process Pain Points

Five heavy-duty motorized pumps were operated periodically to pump out water. This scheduling took place manually and required employees to be working 24/7 at the pumping station to switch the motors on and off. The employees were to maintain a daily usage log for each motor to ensure the load was distributed equally among the pumps.

The water level in the tank was measured by an approximation based on the level of the water as seen by the employee, which we assume was not accurate. With this method, the pump would keep running until the operator realized there was no water in the clean water tank or the voltage was low and switched off the motor.

The person operating the pumping station manually recorded power consumption in a book daily, and there was no mechanism to monitor low voltage.

Ignition SCADA approach

• All processes were transitioned from manual maintenance to fully automated.
• The pumps were programmed with a schedule to operate out of turn for 24 hours, therefore eliminating the need for constant monitoring.
• The automation eliminates the risk of the pump running without water in the tank. Thereby improving the life of the motor and reducing power consumption.
• Logs are generated automatically and can be printed out as daily reports to view performance reports by each motor.

The power meter installed provides reports of daily power consumption and voltage by each motor pump. In case of insufficient voltage, the pumps get switched off automatically, thereby increasing the life of the motors.

A transmitter was installed to monitor water levels automatically and give indications & alarms where the water level is higher or lower than the required standard in the clean water tanks.

OpteBiz Advantage

1. 25% reduction in labor cost related to starting and stopping of pumps in remote areas, real-time information about performance and rapid response
2. Centralized monitoring of motor status on/off/trip, run time duration, Schedule, Voltage, Current, Energy consumption, Alarm (overload/under voltage/over voltage/fail to start/stop) and motor voltage and Current trends
3. Centralized monitoring of the clean water tank level and alarms (Low-Low, Low, High and High-High)
4. Automatic report generation after a particular interval of time for power consumption for motor, trip and alarm reports
5. Information status of the clean water tank on real-time basis at any given time.
6. Centralized configuration for Clean Water Tank alarms, motor alarms, and motor schedule etc.
7. Manpower costs
8. Ease of Operations
9. Increase of life span for motor pumps
10. Reduction in consumption of power
11. Accurate information & consistency in operations of the clean water tank pumping station

The client has seen the benefits of automation in one area of the water treatment plant and is planning to automate the remaining five areas of the water treatment plant and establish a centralised control center for the total plant operations.