SCADA & TeleControl System Pump Up the Quality of Life for Sri Lankans

Water quality is a critical issue in Sri Lanka. Industrial pollution and contamination from dumping waste are the top contenders in a long list of factors impacting Sri Lanka’s poor water quality. The effects of utilizing it have been reported in the form of skin diseases, hepatitis and other grave health issues.
In light of health risks, there has been a big push to quickly address the water supply issue.  One system that has been deployed is already improving the water quality situation.  It is a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) managing hundreds of mobile reverse osmosis (RO) stations.

Reverse Osmosis Stations Restore Water Quality

Reverse Osmosis is used to remove the majority of contaminants from water by pushing it under pressure through a semi-permeable membrane.  Typically, there is a wide array of dissolved minerals in groundwater.  The naturally dissolved minerals, such as salt, as well as dissolved industrial contaminants are removed by the RO process, creating demineralized water that is safe to consume.  RO stations are placed at various wells to supply clean drinking water for the local residents. 
The SCADA system for this water-monitoring project has been configured and the project is well underway.  The SCADA is monitoring the state of the RO stations to assess if they are working properly.  It checks the quality of the water and reports on such indicators as PH and conductivity values as well as monitoring the status of the stations pumps. 
The stations communicate with cellular modems that are connected with PcVue’s SCADA system via Siemens’ OPC TeleControl server. 

There are alarms configured in the PcVue SCADA to alert adverse conditions at the station.  These alarms are raised when there are any changes to station status.  An operator who has credentials granting them appropriate user rights can acknowledge alarms.  User rights provide a level of security for the actions within the PcVue SCADA application.  In this distributed application, alarms or changes to any status points are acquired by the SCADA server in the control station.  This ensures the control station is aware of acknowledged alarms and allows them to track the status of various wells.

The Use of Mobile Telecommunications

The PcVue SCADA application uses the built-in GEO Map control (graphical component) configured for a GIS (Geographical Information System) decision-making display within the SCADA graphics.  The GEO Map control uses a standard map provider, in this case Google Maps, which is overlaid with markers created by the PcVue editor capable of displaying real-time information representing the RO stations.  The SCADA GIS allows the operator to locate and track the RO stations with ease. Read more