Watercare Warkworth

We love getting involved in projects that benefit the community, so when we were approached by Watercare to assist at their new water treatment plant in Warkworth, we jumped at the opportunity.

Watercare commissioned ControlWeb to develop the control systems at their new water treatment plant build at Warkworth. This plant is meant to run fully autonomously with off-site monitoring but with alarms raised to indicate when human intervention is required.

What We Did

For this project, Controlweb was requested to develop new standards for the individual control modules and associated graphics for the Emerson DeltaV operating system. These standards will be used for all future Watercare plants running DeltaV.

In close collaboration with Watercare, improvements to the initially designed functionality was implemented. This was to standardise the initial functionality to line up with the newly created standard. Also, to simplify the control structure as much as possible. This led to a more robust overall control.

A hierarchical control structure was created with the plant sectioned into control areas. These areas include the bore pumps, chlorine dosing, filters, UV treatment and treated water pump station. Each area was then programmed, and custom simulation software was written to simulate all possible scenarios for thorough testing.

As this is a new site the software installation was straightforward. Each area for the plant control could be installed separately. That meant each area could be fully tested in isolation before the overall control was installed.

The plant is currently undergoing final testing and tuning and the project is nearing completion. We are eager to see the end results of the new plant.