Surat Corporation is supplying more than 680 million liters per day drinking water to the citizens of Surat, for which more than 259 numbers of pumps and motors of various capacities, size, and type are being operated and maintained round the clock basis. There are 10 major water distribution stations and four pumping stations, responsible for effective treated water distribution in the various parts of the city.

Total number of connections in a city are 3.25 lacks so far. It is possible to operate small and medium plants; the same is not the case with large capacity plant as the scale of operation demands higher skill sets and labour. To improve reliability and operational efficiencies, effective monitoring for optimizing operational cost and to provide transparency, latest and proven technology SCADA Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition has been implemented.
SMC started the following automation initiatives for the operations of water teatment plants:

• Setting up a 120 MLD capacity state of the art treatment facility
  • Actuated valves for auto operation of filter beds and control for auto operation and monitoring
  • Flow monitoring system on raw water
• Introduction of electro-magnetic soft starters for the intake well pump sets operation
• Installation of microprocessor based on air circuit breakers wherein precise monitoring and controlling of electrical parameters for incoming and outgoing feeders can be done
• Automation of water treatment plant by introducing semi-auto mode instrument control panel, junction box, ICP&JB, human machine interface and full auto mode dedicated software
• Installation of online water quality monitoring system for raw water and treated water quality monitoring
• Introduced microprocessor-based soft starter and power analyzer, electronic relay for circuit breakers, monitoring and controlling software

• Successful stand-alone SCADA system for water treatment plant operations
• Successful SCADA system for chain of intake well - Booster pumping station - water distribution system
• Manual data collection is totally replaced with automated data generation and back up
• Quality control is improved and hence, consumption of process inputs in water treatment process is optimized
• Owning to the PLC based operation all the system parameters, transients and data and event history are readily available for analysis, which helps to improve system performance
• Automatic generation of performance report periodically which helps the department take further course of action
• Energy savings like load equalization on various transformers, power factor improvement and soft start and soft stop operations of pumps
• Reduction in the time of maintenance of operating system
• In any system which has multi location installation, the system at individual stations should be technologically similar, to ensure the establishment of smooth station-to-station coordination

It is easier to implement the SCADA system but at the same time, without engineering backup, it is difficult to maintain it for its long run performance. In-house technical know-how for the maintenance of SCADA system is necessary.

For further details, contact:

Ms. Aparna
Municipal Commissioner
Surat Municipal Corporation SMC