Remote - Summer 2012 - (Page 16)

Applications - Feature In the Flow - Water Treatment & Distribution at Super-Rimiez Plant The Générale des Eaux, now part of Veolia Water, has operated at its site since the Principality of Nice became part of France in 1884. At the end of the 19th century, the Vésubie canal was constructed to draw in water at Saint Jean La Rivière, 886 feet above sea level. The Super-Rimiez plant for producing drinking water was opened in 1972. Since then it has been upgraded several times in terms of capacity and technology including a complete renovation in 1998 and a system upgrade in 2007. This evolution has kept it at the forefront of potable water production sites in Europe, with nine production centers and a capacity of 16,240,000 cubic feet (460,000 m3) per day. The center provides water to some 64 communities via nine drinking water plants and 2,112 miles (3,400 km) of pipes. The drinking water makes its way from the canal to the faucet by means of a complex, four-step process. First the water is withdrawn from underground aquifers or from bodies of surface water. Water is pumped from wells and then protection areas are set up to prevent the pollution of water sources. The water is that treated to make it drinkable. The water undergoes several types of treatments, which includes coarse and fine screening, flocculation and settling, filtration, ozonation and chlorination. Once this processing is complete, the treated water goes through an infrastructure of piping and storage. Drinking water is piped through closed pipe systems. It is stored in reservoirs that are usually located on high ground, such as underground basins on hilltops and water towers. Distributing the water to customers is a complex process. Water is piped to its ultimate destination through a complex system of conduits equipped with gates and regulation devices. At the helm of navigating all of these processes sits the main plant, Super-Rimiez which uses PcVue SCADA for all of its process monitoring and control onsite and for all the remote facilities that are located upstream and downstream. ment team at the Super-Rimiez plant found PcVue’s graphical user interface extremely user-friendly when developing the 1,300 mimic displays and 600 plus objects in PcVue SCADA. In fact, the developers and engineers were able to configure screens much faster than traditional SCADA packages and thereby substantially reduced the costs and time to deploy their application. In terms of the communication backbone, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) provides connectivity throughout the plant including the 23 SCADA terminals. TCP/IP is the communications used for handling any automatic cutover to backup services if needed as well as the communications to deliver automatic or manual restoration to the main service. The networks use a virtual private network (VPN) and ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) plus satellite link for the main connections, as well as GPRS for transmission of timestamped data, etc. via a secure file server. The network serves some 330 tele-surveillance sites (reservoirs and plants etc.) and can deliver an average of 8,000 remote commands as well as acknowledge and supervise 7,000 alarms per month. The remote communications span 89,500 miles and deliver an average remote response time of 360 ms. In addition to processing and archiving remote data transmissions, these facilities are equipped to remotely maintain the software and conduct tele-diagnostics. The facilities are also outfitted to be able to have real time connectivity between the sites. More recently the metropolitan authority of Nice Côte d’Azur wanted to make its water services self sufficient in energy. In responding to the need of producing renewable energy, they looked at reclaiming the potential energy from a waterfall to produce electricity. After having established that the area of Alpes-Maritimes is highly energy dependent and in keeping with its initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the metropolitan authority of Nice Côte d’Azur is evaluating Veolia Water’s proposed installation of four micro-turbines on to the water supply system in order to convert potential energy into useful electrical energy. The untreated water is brought down from a mountain via a canal using ample hydraulic capacity and the main water production plant (Super Rimiez) that is located on the hills of the town 919 feet (280 m) above sea level. The advantage of distributing the city’s drinking water by means of a gravity system is that, as a consequence, there is high pressure (up to 17 bars) when the water enters the water supply system. This pressure can be recovered and converted into electrical energy. This solution for producing renewable energy should make it possible to recover more than 12 GWh of electricity a year, approximately the average annual consumption of more than 3,000 French families. The average consumption of a family of four is around 4 MW a year. For more information please visit www.pcvuesolutions.com. What’s in Store for Nice: Renewable Energy The upstream water is collected from the conduits that route the water from its source, from secondary processing plants and from monitoring stations. PcVue monitors and collects data from the local and remote sites, which include the processing plants and monitoring stations. Downstream the architecture encompasses the drinking water distribution network for the City of Nice, which is the second largest French city on the Mediterranean coast. The drinking water distribution network serves a population of 348,721 within its administrative limits as well as the urban area of Nice to bring the total population being served more than 955,000. However the network has extended as far as Italy and occasionally the water network of the principality of Monaco. The tele-monitoring and control network is comprised of 23 PcVue SCADA terminals, which collects and processes approximately 25,000 variables from some 280 PLCs and RTUs. The engineering development team confiuged 1,300 PcVue SCADA animated displays, otherwise known as mimics. The engineers configure PcVue SCADA using object-oriented technology to save time by allowing the engineer to assign specific data points to objects and save them to a library for reuse. The engineering develop16 www.RemoteMagazine.com Supervising Water Production for Upstream and Downstream Sites http://www.pcvuesolutions.com http://www.RemoteMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Remote - Summer 2012

Remote - Summer 2012
Remote Monitoring in Data Centers Progresses with Emerging DCiM Systems
Multi-Tenant Power Metering and Management
Addressing Cyber Security Vulnerabilities in the Power Grid Infrastructure
Unbreakable SCADA Security: Protecting Hydrocarbon Facilities And Pipeline Networks
Building Networks in Pakistan’s Extreme Environments Puts Remote Management to the Test
In the Flow - Water Treatment & Distribution at Super-Rimiez Plant
SCADA
Networking
Security
Onsite Power
Environmental Monitoring
Industry News
Reducing Maintenance and Energy Costs of Substations with Automation

Remote - Summer 2012