Siemens supplies Dalriada with fieldbus solutions

Siemens has been selected by Dalriada Water to provide and maintain all equipment across the water treatment infrastructure for Northern Ireland Water.

Dalriada Water is a consortium made up of Aecom Design Build (previously Earth Tech), Kelda Water Services and Farrans.

It won a 25-year contract to design, build, finance and operate a large proportion of the water treatment infrastructure for Northern Ireland Water, and enlisted Siemens to provide and maintain all equipment across the network.

Siemens offered a fieldbus solution for use in the project.

The configuration used involved both new and proven technologies, integrating Profinet and Profibus across the plant.

Using the S7-400 controller allowed a Profinet ring to be installed around the plant, giving all the advantages of industrial Ethernet at the plant level, but with real-time capabilities, and then links were installed down to Profibus, which was used in local areas for remote I/O and motor control.

The fieldbus solution meant that the installation costs were reduced and as it included wireless communications, cabling requirements were reduced even further.

In addition, this made installation quicker and easier and fewer materials were used in providing a building to house the equipment as the building needed to be smaller.

The networked solution also allows for operators and engineers to access the site remotely, via Scada software installed onto a laptop.

This means that live data can be collected and viewed by the plant operator or engineer, on their laptop, wherever they may be.

This remote access means that network monitoring can be carried out more quickly and for a lower cost, as it is not necessary for an operator to physically go into the plant in order to collect the data.

This is a benefit for general plant monitoring, but also makes identifying any problems on the network far quicker and easier.

When there is a problem, the operator will be alerted instantly as to where and what the problem is without physically needing to go into the plant to establish what is wrong.

Safety communications were also a big aspect of the Siemens solution.

An S7-416F/PN failsafe controller and failsafe ET200S distributed I/O were installed, allowing Profisafe to be used for the safety communications.

This allowed a single network to be installed for standard and safety communications around the plant, reducing engineering costs.

In addition, the safety I/O was connected to go straight back to the PLC, meaning that faults could be identified more easily, improving safety.

The solution also provided a higher level of safety than is currently required by European standards.

Where as current legislation means that SIL-2 is required, the solution installed by Siemens is at SIL-3 standard, in anticipation of future legislation changes.

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