SCADA Monitoring System for Water Treatment Facility

Overview

A municipal water treatment facility in Mpumalanga responsible for supplying potable water to over 150,000 residents relied on fragmented local control panels with no centralised monitoring. Operators performed manual rounds to record process readings, and alarm conditions were only detected during these periodic inspections — risking compliance breaches and process upsets.

The Challenge

The facility had no SCADA system. Individual process areas — raw water intake, chemical dosing, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection — each had standalone PLC panels with local HMIs. Operators walked the plant every two hours to record readings on paper logs. There was no historical data for trend analysis, no alarm notification system, and no remote visibility for the plant manager. Compliance reporting was a manual, time-consuming exercise requiring days of data compilation.

The Solution

Cretek designed and deployed a complete Ignition SCADA platform with redundant servers, connecting all existing Allen-Bradley MicroLogix and CompactLogix controllers via a new fibre-optic plant network. Custom HMI screens were developed for each process area with intuitive process mimics, real-time trends, and alarm management. A SQL-based historian was implemented for all process tags. Automated compliance reports were configured for pH, chlorine residual, turbidity, and flow data. MQTT gateways enabled secure remote monitoring for the plant manager.

Results

• 100% regulatory compliance reporting achieved with automated data collection and report generation
• 40% reduction in operator rounds — from 2-hourly rounds to exception-based walkthroughs
• Chemical dosing optimised through PID control and trend analysis, reducing consumption by 25%
• Alarm notification via SMS and email for critical conditions (high turbidity, low chlorine, pump failures)
• Historical data archive enabling root cause analysis and long-term process optimisation

Technologies Used