Title:

Sludge Incinerator Plant
Location:

Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Industry:

Waste Water, Sludge Treatment
System:

Siemens PCS7 Distributed Control System. Dual-redundant Controllers and Servers (H-system), 3 x AS’s (PLC's) and 12 x Remote I/O panels on Profibus.
The Project:

The project involved improving, testing and re-commissioning of the process control system of the entire incinerator plant, and safe shutdown system.

The Sludge Incinerator, boiler and turbine was designed to use sewage sludge at 24% dry solids as a fuel.

Before we were involved with the project the new Sludge Incinerator, Boiler and Turbine had been operated for a short period but due to operational and control problems the system had been shutdown. The system had never achieved its design requirement to operate on sludge alone – Auto-thermic. It had always needs additional fuel (natural gas) to keep the plant operational.

We were brought in by the EPC contractor to review the design, enhance the control system and re-commission the system including developing missing design documents such as the Function Design Specification.

Following a detailed design review recommendations were defined, the existing PCS7 software was modified to implement the new features and correct existing errors. The control system was extensively tested including the safety system.

Following the cold commissioning tests we also completed hot commissioning of the process. The plant was handed over to the operating company. We also completed operator training. Once the system was re-commissioned the Incinerator and Boiler operated auto-thermically.