DPMS — Desalination Plant Management System

Abstract

The world desalination market has grown rapidly and has never seen as many new desalination plant contracts as over the last two years. Ongoing privatization in the Middle East has led to new project financing models such as BOT (build-operate-transfer) where contractors have to operate the desalination plant over a long period before handing it over to the client. Thus, rather than focusing on investment costs, more attention must be paid to the operating aspect. Adequate measurement and control, if the system is to perform satisfactorily over an economically justifiable period with a minimum of maintenance, must be carried out. To monitor the performance of an RO desalination system, it is essential to keep consistent and accurate records. Distributed control systems (DCS) are usually implemented into the plant design to process and record the digital and analog process variables. However, to cover all areas of concern in the plant, additional information such as water analysis, operator log sheets and maintenance log have to be collected and processed independently from the DCS. A shortage of skilled operators sometimes leads to a delayed examination of the relevant data and consequently minor operating failures can develop into system failures causing a lower plant availability. Therefore, a need for a computerized information post-processing system approach has arisen which provides a tool to handle all information related to plant operation and maintenance and displays symptoms of performance deviations to the operators. Together with state-of-the-art plant design based on an optimum balance of capital costs and operating cost, this new approach for an integrated record keeping system can considerably contribute to higher availability and less maintenance of reverse osmosis desalination plants.