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Drinking Water Treatment Plant SCADA Application
Project: Kars Municipality Drinking Water Treatment Plant SCADA Application
Date of Writing: August 2024
Project Year: 2024
The existing SCADA software was updated for the Modernization of the Kars Municipality Drinking Water Treatment Plant in 2024. The existing SCADA software was migrated from WinCC SCADA software.
About the System
Established in 2012, Kars Drinking Water Treatment Plant was designed using Siemens S7 Series PLCs, Simatic HMIs and WinCC SCADA software. There was a mimic mosaic panel and two independent WinCC SCADAs in the control room. In 2012, Siemens had update requirements to ensure the continuity of the system designed on existing technologies.
Difficulties encountered in ensuring the continuity of the system!
The firmware versions of PLCs used in such systems, and the versions of the operating systems of computers, lag behind, prolong the re-commissioning processes in case of failure and seriously jeopardize the uninterrupted continuity of the facilities. Even the lag of the operating system version of a SCADA computer complicates the maintenance process of the system so much that businesses may need to take the issue to the point of spending resources on renewing the entire system. So why do these situations occur?
Why is it so hard!
At first glance, you might say, why would it be so difficult to update an operating system, we can just update it and move on. But let's explain the situation with an example.
For example, the operating system of your SCADA computer is Windows 7 and the necessary programming tools (TIA Portal V11) are installed on it and the WinCC version compatible with the current operating system of SCADA is running. Let's assume that our computer is broken and we have all the backups and try to solve the problem step by step.
Step 1: We have allocated a new computer. However, we cannot install Windows 7 and we should not install it anyway for security reasons. We continue with the Windows 11 version.
Step 2: Let's try to install our older version tools on Windows 11. Let's install TIA Portal V11. Let's also try to install the 2012 version of WinCC. At this point, problems slowly start to emerge.
Step 3: Let's upgrade PLC applications to TIA Portal V15 or higher. The path to follow is to upgrade step by step using all TIA Portals in intermediate versions. From V11 to 12 to 13 and so on. We have done the installations for all of these and succeeded.
Step 4: We need to intervene in PLC applications. We connect to the PLC with the new version and lo and behold, there is a firmware incompatibility. We also make an effort here.
Another example is that you need to replace the CPU of an existing PLC. You supply the latest version of the CPU and install it. You hope to load your replacement with the 2012 version of TIA, but again the same situation arises with the need for an update and you have to go through the steps mentioned above.
Certainly some of us have experience in overcoming these situations and you can do it somehow. If your job is to solve these technical difficulties, there is no problem. But if it is to ensure the continuity of the facility and to solve the problem and issues in a short time, you can use different approaches.
This is the solution we are following.
First of all, I would like to state that we had to experience many of the steps mentioned above. The fact that we were able to supply the 2012 version of a faulty S7-1200 PLC in the system made our job a little easier. However, it was much more efficient to migrate it to the inSCADA Platform instead of migrating it to the current version of WinCC SCADA. As always, it is very important to be able to transfer user experiences one-to-one in this migration application. You can see the current SCADA System screens and their equivalents in the inSCADA Platform in the rest of the article.
Figure 1.a : WinCC Filters Page
Figure 1.b: inSCADA Filters Page
Figure 2.a: WinCC Home Page
Figure 2.b: inSCADA Login Page
Figure 3.a: WinCC Exit Page
Figure 3.b: inSCADA Output Page
Figure 4.a : WinCC Chemistry Page
Figure 4.b: inSCADA Chemistry Page
Figure 4.a : WinCC Records Page
Figure 4.b: inSCADA Records Page
We would like to thank our partner Amanos Klor, who implemented this application, for choosing the inSCADA platform in their projects.
Please contact us to benefit from the advantages provided by inSCADA in your similar applications. info@inscada.com