A pumphouse or pump station is a facility that includes pumps and equipment for pumping fluids from one location to another. In this case study, we examine the monitoring system for a pump house used for a residential area. The pumphouse is required to operate automatically 24 hours a day to fulfill the demand and avoid water shortage as there is no assigned operator on site for manual pump control.
Requirements
- The pumphouse requires one main control panel for site operation and one monitoring panel showing parameters.
- The system must control 4 pumps (two pumps run, two pumps standby) to transfer the water from suction tank to elevated tank at the pumphouse.
- The main control panel and monitoring panel must be linked together.
- The pumphouse will be operating 24 hours a day and the control must operate automatically without full time operator at site.
- The pumphouse operation can be monitored remotely and is sending an alarm to the end user when fault happened.
- The pump will be operating only when the level of the elevated tank is LOW while the suction tank is HIGH.
Solution
- Proposed to use PLC inside the main control panel to ease the automated control of the pumphouse operation.
- The PLC has been programmed to fully control the pump and valve in Auto-Mode and has been interlocked with the Manual-Mode. When Auto-Mode is selected, the manual button on the main control panel disabled.
- On Manual-Mode, the control panel must be control manually by the operator at site.
- Some safety measures have been added to the system to ensure the pumphouse operation does not interrupted such as:
- The system cannot operate when elevated tank is not LOW and suction tank is not HIGH in both manual and auto mode.
- The major error such as phase error will stop the whole system operation.
- The individual pump will stop/disabled if there is any individual fault happened.
- When in Auto-Mode, the standby pumps will replace the running pumps that stop due to faulty. Two pumps will always on duty.
- All faults must be reset first to allow the system to operate.
- The manual-mode operation control has been interlocked by the system to prevent human intervention during auto-mode operation.
- All 4 pumps used at the pumphouse as two pumps are running and other two pumps are in standby mode.
- When in Auto-Mode, two running pumps will rotate from 1&2 to 2&3 etc. The rotation will change once the elevated tank reached LOW level from HIGH level. The cycle will be escalated in the auto-mode operation.
- REMOX monitoring panel complete with REMOX system which includes 4G connectivity is made to show the parameters at the pumphouse such as pressure, temperature, flow rate, water level and pump parameters.
- The REMOX system can allow the end-user to remotely access the monitoring panel to view the parameters and pumphouse operation that has been made on the HMI.
- SMS alert will be sent to the end-user if there are any fault happened at site.
- The main control panel been linked with the REMOX monitoring panel using ethernet cable. All the pump parameters on the main control panel been read by the REMOX using Modbus connection.
Conclusions
- The system is able to work according to the requirement during the internal Factory Acceptance Test (FAT). However, the system must be test again at site with actual instruments and pumps.
- Future re-programming will be done at site when the system is fully equipped and ready for operation.
- The pumphouse can be monitored remotely using REMOX system where user can access the REMOX monitoring panel online.
- When fault happened, the operator/authorities will be notified by SMS base on the phone number enabled on the REMOX system.
