Innovative and intelligent industrial automation for Water Treatment Plant in Large Gas Refinery

Amir Firoozshahi, Member, IEEE

Electronics & Electric Eng. Dept. Islamic Azad University, Damavand branch Tehran, Iran afshahi@gmail.com
Abstract An automation system, commonly referred to as a Process Control System or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) System, is critical to the efficient operation, safe and reliable of so many Industrial Processes. Process Control System (PCS) is used widely in infrastructure (including electric power, water, petroleum, and natural gas), as well as in various manufacturing operations. Electronic automation of control enables quicker and more coordinated system management compared to human operation, and in many cases there is no effective alternative to the use of PCS. Water treatment plants have to provide good water quality and at the same time low operational costs. Owing to various physical, chemical and biological interactions water treatment processes are often difficult to handle and reliable predictions for the course of processes are difficult to obtain. This paper focuses on an innovative and intelligent control and monitoring system for Water Treatment Plant that has been successfully designed, implemented and commissioned for large Gas Refinery after case study in international standards. Keywords-control system; industrial automation; water treatment plant; PLC; monitoring; automation system;

I.

INTRODUCTION

The automation of process control, machines and production lines has resulted in the ever-increasing stability of quality, speed and cost savings within complex processes. Users have come to expect high quality in the produced goods they use, but for a control designer, these are the competitions that make the profession interesting. In the recent years, with the fast changes on industries and information technologies, some traditional bulk electronic appliances have to be monitored for a long time. The control of all plant has been carried out by using computers. PLCs (Programmable logic controllers) have made it possible to accurately control big industrial factories with lower installation expenses, wiring than required with standard relays, drum switches, pneumatic timers, and so on. The programmability feature causes rapid and comfortable changes in PLC software to meet the changing needs of the plant without the need for expensive and time consuming rewiring. The capabilities of PLCs have developed over the years, with reliability, performance, and operational. Most production lines use PLC to connect with computers for
978-1-4244-5848-6/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

monitoring every parameters and status. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are extensively used in industrial control because they are easy to erection, very flexible in application and economical. A PLC can communicate through its inputs and outputs signals with the plant. The use of PLC with power electronics in electric machines applications has been introduced in the manufacturing automation [1], [2]. It offers advantages such as lower voltage drop when turned on and the ability to control motors [3]. Several production lines and factories use PLC in automation processes to reduce production expenses and to increase reliability, facilities, availabilities and quality [4] [5]. Other applications comprise machine tools with better accuracy Computerized Numerical Control due to the use of PLC [5]. The application of neural networks and genetic algorithms in drinking water treatment has shown for a ceramic membrane microfiltration plant [6]. The amalgamated PCS can be broken down into five heterogeneous categories to facilitate security analysis as System data, Architecture, Security administration, Networks and Platforms [7]. In some project for control of a chemical WTP, a cascade controller is executed to control the reactor core temperature by controlling the flow rate of cooling water. Sensor setup and master control are also comprehended for complete automation of plant [8],[9]. A usual vacuum system in water plant was taken as an example and its principle was analyzed. The suitable PLC was selected [10]. It has the reference function on the modernization of water plant management. The paper in [11] presents the development and implementation of a RealTime Expert System for the control and supervision of a wastewater treatment pilot plant with biological removal of organic matter and nutrients. The main achievement of this prototype in [12] is a versatile framework able to deal with different plant configurations, based on the object-oriented paradigm and on rule-based reasoning. The Innovative, modernization, design, integration, development and implementation of control system for a DCS-based (Distributed Control System) tank gauging system for the Large Tank Farm is described [13]. In this paper a target to design, develop, and implement industrial control system hardware and software for automation of a water treatment plant is achieved. The SWIP "Sea Water Intake Plant" has been conceived for the water supply of large gas refinery, where it is

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primarily used as cooling medium for both process and utility units. The seawater is pumped by three pumps mounted in parallel and all three pumps are piped into a common manifold. The three filters are installed in parallel on the common manifold to perform the main filtration of the seawater. It also consists of screening units, surge vessels and other equipments. The intelligent industrial automation systems control/indicate necessary signals for different section of plant such as: Pumps, Valves, Screening, Surge Vessel, etc. by PLC. This monitoring system will be conducted all normal field operations by staff located in the control room. The main item directly controlled by the control system is the running of the main pumps, the start-up and shut-down of pumps and associated motor operated valves and flow control. II. DESIGHN AND CONFIGURATION OF CONTROL SYSTEM

Control and monitoring equipment is designed for continuous use with a minimum life cycle of 25 years under all applicable operating and environmental conditions. B. Main Control Room All monitoring and control activities of plant has be conducted from Sea Water Intake control room .It is possible to monitor/activated some control and other status (alarm) signals from Large Gas Refinery Control Room. All marshalling/system cabinets are located in an electrically non-hazardous area, this area named auxiliary room (Technical Room). C. Engineering Configuration Facilities One engineers facilities are provided to enable reconfiguration or maintenance functions to be conducted without process disruption or interference to operations personnel during their routine activities. Diagnostic facilities are supplied as part of the PLC to facilitate accurate and rapid analysis of faults developed within the system. D. Signal processing capabilities The PLC is connected to a variety of instrumentation to satisfy the following demands: 1) Safe and convenient start-up, uninterrupted operation and closedown of plant. 2) Automatic on-off control actions. 3) Regulatory control 4) Information, presentation and control facilities to meet the specified requirements for safety, production rates, efficiency and economic operation. Accuracy and processing rates of signal conversions commensurate with the intended instrument functions and required speed of responses for control or monitoring purposes. III.
INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION AND I/O INTERFACE HARDWIRE AND SOFTWARE

The control system has be designed on a PLC basis ,with all normal field operations being conducted by staff located in the control room .The control system provide operators with three possibilities of operation and control i.e. : x Automatic operation x Remote Manual operation x Local Manual operation A. Operation philosophy The Screens can be operated in automatic mode or manually. x Normal operation Three screening bays are normally in operation. Each screening bay can be isolated and emptied for maintenance purposes. A minimum of two bays is in operation. x Automatic operation In the automatic mode the screen ranker and band speeds are controlled on the water level difference over the primary and secondary screens, and on a timer signal. The screens go into low speed operation on reaching a pre-set low value of level difference (L1) of the water upstream and downstream the screen. When the level difference over the primary and secondary screens is exceeding a pre-set high value of level difference (L2), the screens start operating on high speed. x Manual operation Each screen can be started and stopped by pushing the start/stop button locally as well as in the SWI control room. Each secondary screen has its own wash water system. When starting the secondary screen, the wash water system will start immediately, both in automatic mode and in manual mode. When the secondary screen stops running, the wash water system remains in operation for several minutes for post-cleaning of the screen. The PLC is chosen to provide the user with safe, efficient, coast effective and reliable equipment of proven design. The PLC has a dual redundant architecture to avoid common mode failure points anywhere within the system at a level higher than I/O interface cards.

A. System design description overview For the Industrial automation system of all major equipment, the following preliminary control philosophy is adopted: The control panels of all major equipment are located in the SWI control room. b) The process control is based on an automatic operation, and on PLC control of each main equipment component or package. c) For some equipment items, local manual basic control is possible by using start/stop buttons, located near the equipment involved. Process control data exchanging requirements between the SWI (Sea Water Intake) control room and any other refinery control room DCS are unknown at this moment. Figure 1. shows overview of control system configuration. a)

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D. Loop Diagram Figure 2. shows the sample of one loop diagram for designed control system. It shows the control diagrams and PLC connections with process and other systems.

Figure 1. Control system overview

B. Control System Interfacing 1) Package Interfacing There are two packages in this plant, Air compressor and chlorination packages which supplied by in depended PLC system. Some suitable signals such as stop/running status, alarms and other limited signals are repeated to the main central PLC via discrete cables from packages PLC. 2) MCC(Motor Control Center) Interface To eliminate the need for control and safety systems interfacing with switchgear, a suitable interposing and termination point is provided. 3) Refinery System Interface Some of the process input signals status to the PLC system is repeated to the DCS of different phases of onshore refinery. The interconnection with the refinery DCS is made through a redundant serial link which is made by 2 fiber optical cables using MODBUS protocol. The following data (as a minimum) need to be interchanged. a) From SWI PLC to DCS: x Remote control permissive and x Status of pumps, MOVS, chlorination x Flow & Pressure per pump x Total flow & pressure and Level in SWI basin x Auto/Manual per pump x Screening plant general alarm b) From DCS to SWI PLC: x MOV open/close commands x Pump motor start/stop commands x Selection of duty stand by per pump C. Plant Utilities Plant utility systems include generation and/or distribution facilities for following utilities: x Instrument air and Plant air (to surge vessels) x Diesel fuel x Potable water and Firewater x Chlorinated water

Figure 2.

Loop Diagram

IV.

OPERATOR AND MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE

Normally all four seawater intake pipelines are in operation. Each pipeline can be isolated at the screen basin side by means of a sluice gate. As a minimum, three pipelines are in operation. A. Operator facilities Two operator stations are designed for control and monitoring of SWI plant in control room. Display stations present information to operators in both graphical and tabular forms, integrating information from other sources such as refinery DCS, packages etc. as required in a uniform manner. Information processing facilities included such as following: 1) Alarm annunciation and logging 2) Control interaction and Event logging; 3) Printing of alarm/event logs, reports, screen; dumps etc. and System status indication; Operator console is designed to take into consideration the housing of other operational needs such as telephones, public address microphones and related miscellaneous items. Simulation and test facilities is provided, which enable an authorized operator to isolate, test and calibrate sensor loops. Override and inhibit facilities is provided as required and is enabled via dedicated displays on the control system work stations in strict accordance with permit-to-work procedures. The Operator station software server interface with the plant through the Automation system using Modbus plus Protocol via Interface PIC card which has been installed in Industrial PC (Operator Station). A process data table has been produced which listed PLC variables (shows process variables with PLC addresses and read/write status), HIM software variable tags (shows units and ranges of variables)

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and display of variables (shows how each variable will be displayed). B. Designed Graphic Displays All the process was presented to operators through HIM screens (graphic pages) and operators navigate through graphic pages by using the keyboard and mouse. Figure 3. shows pages relations. In this design, the following pages were presented to operators:

Figure 3. Displays relations with main page

1) Menu Page: The menu page feather buttons to display all pages such as process pages, trend pages, log in log out the Operator station, etc. However graphic pages are linked together, so operators can move easily between pages without needing to redisplay the menu page. 2) Process Displays: In design specification document, we defined all objects with their characteristics in graphic pages according to P&ID drawings and end user requirements. We have several process displays for operators. The main pages are as follows: x Screening plant x Seawater Pumps phase 1 x Seawater Pumps phase 2&3 x SW Distribution & Manifold Phase 1 x SW Distribution & Manifold Phase 2&3 x Chlorination and Fire water Pump Beside we can see the page for main pump station in Figure 4. with Pump control sub display.

We designed several facilities in each pages. For instance, pages have following abilities: x Sending ON/OFF command to pumps and filter x Sending OPEN/CLOSE command to MOVs x Monitoring the values of Pressure, Level, Temperature and flow transmitter x Monitoring status of pumps and filters x Monitoring Fault position for pumps and filters x Monitoring Alarm for objects in its related page 3) Alarm page: Equipment that often has fault conditions are trigger alarms, for example any faults on pumps and filters. Alarms are displayed on a separate page. A summary of alarms is logged to a file and displayed on the alarm summary page. The OIS will defect analog and digital alarms. Analog alarms are triggered depending on the value of the variable and definition of HH, H, L and LL status of variable which we assign during configuration. Digital alarms are triggered when Fault signals of pumps and filters are activated. 4) Hardware overview page: This page will monitor hardware and shows alarms of hardware in hardware system. Figure 5. shows HW page.

Figure 5. Hardware ststus display

5) Trend pages: A trend graph will display changes in different variables such as PT, FT& LT on the line. Figure 6. shows trend display in process display.

Figure 4. Main pump page

Figure 6. Trend display in process display

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Variables, which must be analyzed, will be assigned trend tags and logged in history files. Trends will be displayed in real time on a separate trends page, but the variables will be logged continuously, so operators will be able to view past trends as well as current trends. 6) Report pages: A report will be run on operator request and logging for example Pumps status, PT and LT values to a file and operator can view report page by selecting button on the menu page. 7) Security: We classified users as either operators or supervisors, with access to a subset of commands by the use of passwords and user privileges. The operator will enter a password and could monitor all plant and acknowledge alarms. The supervisor could access to system commands for example on/off pumps, filters. The plant will be split into two distinct areas: x Area one: Main plant operation. This gives the user access to the menu page and all process and alarm pages. x Area two: This reserves areas for administrative operations such as creating new user. 8) Legend page: This page will define the useful information for new operators and define any objects and colors which used in monitoring software. V. CONCLUSIONS

process control. This work will also be much helpful for installing operation-support system such as Advanced Alarm System, and Advanced Control such as multivaluable control scheme for more profitable operation and control. Several projects have already been completed successfully. REFERENCES
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The Control and monitoring system has been successfully designed, installed, commissioned and started up. All features accessed and operators are working by this system easily and satisfied. All engineers have been trained for any modification, development, expansion and maintenance. Successful experimental results were obtained from the previously described scheme indicating that the PLC can be used in automated systems with water treatment plant. The monitoring control system of the plant controlled by PLC proves its high saved operation and intelligent facilities for operator. We saved about %46 cabling cost because of networking. Also reliability of control system is high because of redundancy in several levels. Despite the reliable of the control method used, this system presents: x Full automatic and intelligent operation in all sections. x Full parameter display for supervisor and operators. x Very good final product by good control x Higher efficiency x The availability of the system is more than 99.9%. Thus, the PLC proved to be a versatile and efficient control tool in industrial plants. This project is aimed at control and operation improvement by utilizing innovative Monitoring and control system in WTP. Through reduction of the Process Alarm and Manipulation by operator, we aim to stabilize the

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