Situation
Modular products from Delta, the world leader in power electronics and energy management solutions, have been selected as part of an innovative automated system installed recently at a major water treatment facility in Romania. The solution, which is based on Delta modular hardware architecture components that include PLCs, industrial Ethernet switches, HMI, motor drives and around 1400 I/O points, is providing drinking water and wastewater treatment plant automation for a population of around 30,000 people in Sebes, Petresti and Lancram in central Romania.

Solution
The installation was devised by system integrator Costruzioni Dondi SpA, and involved providing a distributed control system to principal plant processes such as pumping stations and water level monitoring equipment.

The control system architecture comprises supervisory, network and control layers. A third party SCADA system with two redundant servers providing data acquisition and archiving in the supervisory layer, as well as process control and monitoring services via remote control.

In the network layer, Delta Managed Industrial Ethernet Switches with network redundancy technology and TCP/IP fibre optics (in ring topology network) are able to deliver tolerance to any network failures with a self-recovery time of less than 20ms. Here, data access protection is provided through a firewall.

The actual control layer for local visualisation and operation is made up of various Delta products, including three new generation, modular AH500 PLCs plus I/O modules, a DOP-B 7” colour touchscreen HMI, 1400 I/O points and CP2000 sensorless vector control (SVC) drives. SVC offers timely response to load torque increase/decrease which satisfies customer requirements for load changes while enhancing motor performance and helping reduce energy consumption.

Conclusion
“There are many reasons we opted to use Delta products for this important installation, including their excellent cost-to-performance ratio,” explains Valentin Tuturiga, Project Manager at Costruzioni Dondi. “In addition, the scalability of the modular Delta products was important, while the development software was provided free of charge. We also liked the ease of communication with Delta’s technical support team, who were able to help us whenever we required advice.”

The benefits for the water treatment plant have been wide-reaching and include higher productivity, reduced operating costs and better utilisation of staff with dependable process automation, communication and information management. This is in addition to easy control of pumping stations and monitoring of water levels. Furthermore, fast and efficient alarm management enables engineers to react quickly to failures and malfunctions, which in turn provides better environmental compliance and monitoring.
 
“The implementation of this project is a complete success and now serves as a model for other water treatment plants in Romania,” concludes Mr Tuturiga. “In fact, we have recently completed a further two installations in Neamt County and just placed an order for Delta PLCs and inverters for another three new projects.”