Abstract
Automation and reliability are the crucial elements of any advance reverse osmosis plant to meet the environmental and economic demands. Early fault indication, diagnosis and regular maintenance are the key challenges with most of the reverse osmosis plants in the Indian scenario. The present work introduces a modern reverse osmosis (RO) plant status monitoring unit to monitor different plant parameters in real time and early prediction for faults and maintenance. Developed RO plant status monitoring unit consists of a touch screen-based embedded monitoring unit, water quality sensors (pH, TDS), sampling chamber for controlled water flow, flow sensors, pressure and level sensors. The present system has been developed in a modular fashion so that it could be integrated with any capacity of RO plant units. Developed embedded system monitors various parameters of the plant such as input power, efficiency of the plant, level of input and output water tank and also guides operator with instructions for plant operation. Other than this, a dedicated smartphone app interface has been developed for the operator to acquire data from status monitoring unit, storage on smartphone, and transfer it to the cloud. The developed smartphone-based app also provides facility to integrate plant data with Google map with location information for easy understanding and quick action. The system has also a backup facility to transfer data to the server using 2G GSM module during the unavailability of the operator. A dedicated centralized Web server has been developed for real-time visualization of all installed RO plant status monitoring units. Different machine learning techniques have been implemented on acquired sensors data to predict early warnings related to power failure, membrane fouling and scaling, input water shortage, pipe, tank leakage, water quality sensors damage, non-operation or wrong operation of the plant along with different maintenance actions such as membrane water and chemical wash. Developed RO status monitoring unit has been tested with various RO plants having capacity from 500 LPH to 2000 LPH and deployed at various nearby villages of Rajasthan.
Highlights
Increasing demand for fresh potable water leads toward the requirement of different advance automatic water treatment solutions
Regular maintenance of membrane and monitoring of feed water and plant parameters increase the productivity of reverse osmosis (RO) plant and reduce the chances of early membrane fouling which prolongs the life of the RO membrane and overall plant (Sobana and Rames 2011)
Other than early fault prediction, predictive maintenance facility related to the membrane, sensors, filters maintenance for Indian RO plant operators is one of the essential needs to be tackled to increase the life of the overall plant and maintain optimum operating conditions
Summary
Increasing demand for fresh potable water leads toward the requirement of different advance automatic water treatment solutions. An embedded system (Fig. 3b) has been designed and developed to acquire real-time data of off-the-shelf sensors interfaced with RO plant to measure various plant parameters such as feed and product flow rate, input power, water level, feed and product pH, TDS. RO plant status monitoring unit (Fig. 3a) has been developed in modular fashion (Fig. 4) and consists various submodules such as embedded data acquisition, monitoring and control unit along with commercial sensors with 4–20-mA current transmitters for pH and TDS sensors installed in sampling chamber for real-time feed and product water quality data collection, commercial uninterrupted power supply module (U.P.S) for power backup. The resources used to develop dedicated hardware modules are Darlington array (ULN2003) to drive relay array, external E2PROM (24LC1025) for data storage at local level, port expander (MCP23017) to generate additional digital input
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