Adroit heads south to manage water system

13 June 2008

Amatola Water, state owned East London, South Africa based water board, has implemented a SCADA system in response to the rapid growth of its radio telemetry system.

The system has grown from 16 outstations to 96 and Amatola turned Adroit, the North West England based SCADA specialist, to monitor plant operation and reservoir levels.

Gerry Roux, senior technician at Amatola’s radio and telemetry section, said the package was ‘user-friendly’ and ‘intuitive’.

The reticulation system effectively consists of three large plants, and another four smaller ones and the balance of the outstations consist of the reservoirs that require monitoring. The SCADA system reports back via radio telemetry to a central PC running Adroit version 6.

Telemetry specialist and system integrator, SSE created the basic graphics of components such as the shape of reservoirs and screen layouts for the original system.

Roux has since taken the original overview graphics, and using an area map has created a background for the mimic screens. This provides an account of where the outstations are located.

Amatola has a 5,000 tag Adroit license but is only using about 3,000.

Roux said: ‘We are only using about 25 per cent of Adroit’s potential because it is not necessary to get any more complicated.’

At the major plants, the Adroit SCADA monitors flow with data collected from Magflow meters. Totals, turbidity meters and sampling meters are amongst those used for rudimentary data display purposes.

The six major pump stations have PLC controlled MC panels. The telemetry RTU is connected to the PLC via a serial interface using Modbus protocol and provides the ability to monitor all the inputs as well as providing the facility for remote modifications of certain measuring and controlling parameters within the PLC.


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