Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, today announced that its PlantPAx® distributed control system (DCS) is providing essential digitalized process control and optimization at the recently modernized water treatment plant at Kocaeli, one of the biggest industrial cities in Türkiye, 100 kilometers southeast of Istanbul.
Operated by İzmit Su A.Ş. (İSAŞ), an autonomous organization that works with the city, the upgrade project was undertaken by Gema Endüstriyel Kontrol, a silver-level system integrator in the Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork™. It entailed the replacement of a 25-year-old control system, with a modern fully redundant DCS, comprising the PlantPAx platform, process controllers, and 2,500 I/O. All of this was done with zero downtime.
In addition to leveraging the capabilities and features of a more-contemporary control solution, İSAŞ is also benefitting from faster data analysis, greater flexibility, and higher process efficiency, coupled to more intuitive, easier, and more streamlined operator interactions.
According to Ediz Eren, regional vice-president for the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa at Rockwell Automation: “Fresh water is becoming scarcer as populations grow and shift, so optimized water-treatment operations are critical to help protect supplies. With our PlantPAx DCS at the heart of the new control architecture, İSAŞ and the city of Kocaeli can have confidence that their new treatment facilities now have far greater resilience to help ensure uninterrupted supply.”
Gökhan Yildiz, Technical Manager at Gema Endüstriyel Kontrol, adds: “Downtime was simply not allowed during the upgrade, so we had to dismantle the old panels and add the new ones simultaneously. Factory acceptance testing (FAT) and site acceptance testing (SAT) were also held during commissioning, the result being a full migration to the new system with no downtime at all.”
Mehmet Küçüksari, group information technology manager at İSAŞ, explains: “The new PlantPAx DCS-based solution is giving us deeper integration, even with the PLCs from other suppliers used in parallel processes. But it’s the operator interfaces that really set it apart. These are delivering critical data in real time and allowing the operators to fine tune parameters without having to go in at a programming level. More technical and detailed diagnostic tools also will help us to maintain the system more efficiently. In this way, we can ensure clean, fresh drinking water for the 1.6 million customers in the region without risk of an interrupted supply.”
