Sulzer provides risk management solution for British power generation company

Sulzer’s client runs a large power distribution business in the UK, and delivers electricity to eight million homes and businesses. In London alone, it covers an area of 772 square kilometers with cables stretching across 36,682km.

The London network is almost exclusively underground and serves some of the most sensitive locations in the UK. Sulzer was chosen to assist with providing a solution for managing the risk, should a flood situation occur.

“The Sulzer technical team worked closely together with the customer to overcome the considerable challenges presented.”
Ken Gipson, Sales Manager – Domestic and Commercial Wastewater

The challenge

Unreliable discharge data: the power generation company could not give the local water company accurate information on the volume of surface water they were discharging into the sewer to allow accurate billing. In many cases they were overpaying.
Pump maintenance: with the number of pump stations involved, an efficient process for effectively monitoring and maintaining all pumps was important.
Flooding in any of the tunnels could prove catastrophic to the UK capital’s security and economy, not to mention the disruption to everyday life.

The solution

Sulzer supplied submersible drainage pumps XJ 80, a PC242 pump controller, and a level sensor MD127 to four tunnels in the customer’s network.

The Sulzer control and monitoring package, incorporating AquaWeb, monitors multiple pump stations and feeds back live data to the customer’s PCs and mobile phones.

Sulzer AquaWeb is an advanced alarm management system with powerful alarm handling features. It also includes management tools giving full visibility of the current situation and allows remote reset of motor protection devices before sending an engineer on site.

Customer benefit

The live data received via the pump controller and visible through the AquaWeb platform measures accurately the pump discharge rate and allows reliable and accurate data to be submitted to the local water company. This ensures that the power generation company only pays for the water discharged.

Thanks to live data being constantly displayed on PC / mobile phone through AquaWeb, the on-call maintenance supervisor can make a decision whether to attend the pump immediately when a pump alarm is activated, or delay the visit until the next morning.

The AquaWeb advanced alarm management system gives constant and reliable advance notice of potential problems with the pumps and allows decisions to be made in order to avoid a possible catastrophic failure.

The new Sulzer control panel was able to connect to the AquaWeb to give real-time data to show how the station is operating. It also needs to interface with the existing Scada system the customer already uses for alarms.