Menindee Water Treatment Plant Augmentation

Project Overview

The existing Menindee WTP was constructed in 1985 and has a capacity of 14.5 L/s which requires upgrading. 

Identified issues are: 

  • Ageing equipment;
  • High risk of treatment failure;
  • Limited capabilities to treat iron and manganese in source water;
  • High-risk manual batching of treatment chemicals;
  • Risk of algal blooms;
  • Instrumentation, process control and process automation required
  • Redundancy not available for some key processes;
  • Some key infrastructure unsecured;
  • Chemical storage and handling not compliant; and
  • Risks associated with access to various onsite tanks.

The new WTP at Menindee is designed to meet the needs and service the community into the future increasing capacity to 25 L/s. The new WTP was constructed on the same site as the existing treatment plant, in an area of the site adjacent to the existing infrastructure. 

The existing water treatment plant was to remain in operation throughout the construction and commissioning 

of the new WTP, only being decommissioned after the new water treatment plant is complete. 

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​RIC Services

Design of Electrical System 

Switchboard manufacture and installation 

General power and lighting 

Process electrical and instrumentation 

PLC & SCADA programming 

Challenges

Installation of new WTP adjacent the existing WTP whilst keeping existing WTP operational. Numerous systems within the plant were to be retained which involved taking partial or complete control of sections of the plant during commissioning which needed to be available to both the existing and new WTP. 

Remote location – Site is a 7 hour drive on rough country road or over 10 hour driver during adverse weather conditions. This meant we needed to do as much work in house and ensure our time on site was spent effectively. 

Achievements

RIC invested significant time into developing a completely new and reusable programming standard which could be rapidly implemented whilst being adaptable to site specific needs. Some improvements include: 

  • the ability to use an excel spreadsheet (developed by RIC) that, once filled out with asset IDs and descriptions, would generate much of the PLCs base code ready to be imported directly into the PLC project, thus minimising the possibility of programmer errors and improving productivity of future projects.
  • the ability to simulate all field equipment within the PLC. This meant that PLC code could be functionally tested for correct operation prior to any equipment being connected, plus gave complete flexibility with site commissioning where equipment may not be available for periods of time.
  • Standard SCADA programming was developed to work hand-in-hand with PLC code and used features of the SCADA package not previously used by RIC. This makes it possible to add future equipment to both the PLC and SCADA in a manner of minutes (including all variables, alarms, trends and graphics) with only process and tuning steps taking further time. It also allowed for certain alterations within the PLC to be immediately reflected on SCADA without the need to make any changes to SCADA programming.