Posted to News on 2nd Jan 2024, 14:00
Overcoming obsolescence at the Izmit Water-Treatment Plant in Türkiye
Rockwell Automation's PlantPAx distributed control system (DCS) is providing essential digitalised process control and optimisation at the recently modernised water treatment plant at Kocaeli, one of the biggest industrial cities in Trkiye, 100 km southeast of Istanbul.
Operated by zmit Su A.. (SA), an autonomous organisation that works with the city, the upgrade project was undertaken by Gema Endstriyel Kontrol, a silver-level system integrator in the Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork. It entailed the replacement of a 25-year-old control system, with a modern fully redundant DCS, comprising the PlantPAx platform, process controllers, and 2,500 I/O. All of this was done with zero downtime.
In addition to leveraging the capabilities and features of a more-contemporary control solution, SA is also benefitting from faster data analysis, greater flexibility, and higher process efficiency, coupled to more intuitive, easier, and more streamlined operator interactions.
Ediz Eren, regional vice-president for the Middle East, Trkiye and Africa at Rockwell Automation, says: Fresh water is becoming scarcer as populations grow and shift, so optimised water-treatment operations are critical to help protect supplies. With our PlantPAx DCS at the heart of the new control architecture, SA and the city of Kocaeli can have confidence that their new treatment facilities now have far greater resilience to help ensure uninterrupted supply.
Gkhan Yildiz, technical manager at Gema Endstriyel Kontrol, adds: Downtime was simply not allowed during the upgrade, so we had to dismantle the old panels and add the new ones simultaneously. Factory acceptance testing (FAT) and site acceptance testing (SAT) were also held during commissioning, the result being a full migration to the new system with no downtime at all.
Mehmet Kksari, group information technology manager at SA, explains: The new PlantPAx DCS-based solution is giving us deeper integration, even with the PLCs from other suppliers used in parallel processes. But it's the operator interfaces that really set it apart. These are delivering critical data in real time and allowing the operators to fine tune parameters without having to go in at a programming level.
More technical and detailed diagnostic tools also will help us to maintain the system more efficiently. In this way, we can ensure clean, fresh drinking water for the 1.6 million customers in the region without risk of an interrupted supply.
