POWER April 2014 - 79

INSTRUMENTATION & CONTROL
4. Old school. When operator interface panel boards are replaced with modern PC-based
HMIs, extensive training is needed to bring plant personnel up to speed. Courtesy: ControlsPR
Study and planning also revealed that
maintaining unit uptime was essential, as
these units provide baseload to the city. To
address this issue, a redundant automation
system was selected. New coordinated combustion
control and burner management systems
were provided for each unit, and each
of these systems was provided with tripleredundant
controllers and dual-redundant
power supplies.
The new automation system is a GE
Mark VI Integrated Control System with
Cimplicity HMI, as this combination of
hardware and software was found to be best
for this particular application. To meet the
customer's reporting and compliance goals,
an OSIsoft PI data historian was purchased,
installed, and integrated with the new automation
system.
The data historian allows plant personnel
replace the existing pneumatic and relaycontrolled
combustion, steam, and burner
management systems on two of its units.
Each of these units uses a natural gas-fired
boiler to supply steam to a turbine generator.
The capacity of each unit is in the 50-MW to
100-MW range, and the two units were commissioned
decades ago.
Although the existing automation system
was not a DCS, the challenges were similar
in that the reasons for the upgrade had to be
determined to ascertain the goals, and then a
plan had to be made to perform the upgrade
and meet those goals.
The city engaged Maverick Technologies
for the upgrade project, and Maverick
found that the initial challenges were to develop
conceptual designs with basically no
data from the original configuration and with
minimal information on any subsequent upgrades
and/or changes to the facility. The first
steps were to identify the customer's goals
and develop a baseline for the project.
During that process, it was determined that
the reasons for replacing the existing automation
systems were to stabilize critical control
variables (such as steam pressure, temperature,
and drum level) in order to produce power
based on varying dynamic load changes. The
utility also needed to ensure it could maintain
load during peak operating periods.
Plant operators needed an efficient operational
management system that would enable
them to quickly address system upsets, and
the facility needed to generate regulatory reports
from historical trend data. To achieve
these goals, it was important to design a system
offering seamless control while providing
operators with centrally located operator
consoles. As with most upgrades, it was also
critical to minimize downtime during system
cutover and to provide the operations staff
with an automation system that they could
April 2014 | POWER
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79
maintain with existing internal resources.
The evaluation study showed that the best
way to satisfy operator demands was with a
centralized HMI console that would include
a number of PC-based operator interface terminals.
This was a big step for the plant, as
the console replaced antiquated operator interface
panel boards (Figure 4), so extensive
training would be required prior to commissioning
and startup.
to quickly generate reports to ensure regulatory
compliance and to identify operational
performance trends. Identification and analysis
of these trends enables performance improvements
and also can pinpoint problem
issues before they escalate. ■
-Tyrone Bowman
(tyrone.bowman@mavtechglobal.com) is
industry manager, Pulp & Paper, Power
& Energy Solutions, Field Services for
Bolting solutions

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POWER April 2014

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