|
Thames
Water Hampton Treatment works produces 600million litres of water per
day! Just one of five major treatment works situated around London to
serve this metropolis. Located adjacent to the river Thames and within
walking distance of King Henry VIII’s famous Hampton Court, this
treatment works is the largest of the five major treatment works and
one of the largest in Europe. Along with Ashford Common, Kempton Park,
Walton and Coppermills it provides water to some 6 million users.
Aston Dane plc have been working with Thames Water for many years.
When the time came to replace the existing Supervisory Control And
Data Acquisition (SCADA) system at the Hampton works, Thames turned to
Aston Dane for assistance. As part of an overall replacement project
which will see the entire London Water Supply SCADA system overhauled,
Hampton represents the largest of the major treatment works in terms
of water throughput and in complexity from a SCADA
replacement standpoint due to the diversity of top level control nodes
that must be interfaced to the new system.
Hewlett Packard - RTap™
When it came to the specification of the new system Aston Dane
evaluated a number of potential products in the market place. After
careful consideration the only product capable of meeting the
stringent requirements Thames engineering and operational staff needed
was Hewlett Packards RTap SCADA offering.
Recently demerged from HP and relaunched under a new name "Agilent"
their RTap system uses state of the art Microsoft Windows NT ™
technology as its platform with an all new ‘Visualizer’ front end
client also running under NT. RTap is well known in its Unix version,
with over 3000 installs world wide. However Thames Waters IT business
strategy called for an all NT offering. Agilent were in the final
stages of porting the product to NT and already had an alliance with
Rockwell Software to OEM a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which
is now marketed by Agilent as ‘Visualizer.’
The result is an extremely
flexible and scaleable SCADA solution which will be capable of
providing the London Water Supply business area of Thames Water
with the ideal platform to develop business information integration
across the entire corporate network.
A variety of PLC’s
The Hampton site has a variety of PLCs, which Rtap had to
communicate with. The main process areas of the plant, Low Lift Pumps
(LLP), Rapid Gravity Filters (RGF), Slow Sand Filters (SSF), and High
Lift Pumps (HLP) use Gem80-400 PLCs in a Hot Standby configuration,
connected directly to the site wide Ethernet network and using Decnet
protocol. New and ancillary areas of the plant, Ozone, granular
activated carbon (GAC) and standby generators (AGMS), use Allen
Bradley PLC5 PLCs in a variety of standalone and dual redundant
configurations, communicating via Allen Bradley Pyramid Integrators to
the site wide Ethernet Network using TCP/IP. A number of Bristol
Babcock RTUs were also providing reservoir and LWRM information to the
existing SCADA.
Data Points
Approximately 45,000data points had to be checked and imported into
Rtap via a number of custom written utilities. Testing of the
new Rtap NT system at Aston Dane’s new Integration Test Centre in
Alcester, Warwickshire was implemented through a test infrastructure
comprising RTap and the retiring Bristol Babcock's Enterprise system
network connected to the Allen Bradley, Gem80 and Bristol Babcock
RTU's. Rigorous testing of the new system was necessary to
ensure precise data mapping and performance expectations satisfied.
|
