The Background.
Booth Welsh was awarded the contract to design and manufacture a process control system for a major utility company in Saudi Arabia, for phase two of its new seawater RO desalination plant.
Approx. 4000 field I/O
Enabled a reliable production capacity of 58,500m3/da
The Client
Our client is in the Saudi water market and is active in the design & build of membrane desalination and treatment plants for potable and process water in Saudi Arabia, serving industrial and municipal clients. The company is part of one of Saudi Arabia’s prominent organisations.
The Solution.
Booth Welsh chose the Siemens Simatic PCS7 v8.0 process control system platform and designed the control system architecture for the high reliability and availability that the continuous process plant requires. Every hour of downtime represents lost revenue for our customer.
High availability was primarily achieved by utilising reliable, proven in use equipment combined with redundant infrastructure to provide fault tolerance:
The software solution is designed for automated control and monitoring of the plant, including start-up and shutdown, reducing the requirement for operational personnel so it can be controlled and monitored from the Central Control Room. Water treatment technologies controlled and monitored by the system are:
As well as providing a conventional Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system the control system aims to close the gap found in many process plants between the operations level and the management and administration level. Most SCADA system historical data is archived into a database traditionally accessible only from the control system operator screens. This makes it difficult for the management level to access the data for use in analysing plant performance. This system provides access to the data by bridging the control system computer network and the office IT environment and allowing management staff visibility of the data via standard software applications such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Excel and Word. The solution was delivered under a demanding timescale. Booth Welsh worked closely with the client to assist them in achieving their overall system delivery. This included a phased delivery of the system to allow site installation and commissioning works to commence on parts of the system while configuration and test of other parts was completed off site.
The Benefits.
High system reliability 24/7, full fault tolerance and minimised downtime.
Highly sophisticated automation significantly reduces number of required operating personnel and potential of human error.
Central location monitoring.
Integration into standard software packages for ease of data analysis.