Kenya Airport – Modernization of the Water Pumping Station

„The rich functionality and high reliability make this device family our number one in the field of telemetry and applications performing remote supervision. Show us the work to do and we will add a new value to your company using MT-101. Just let us know and we will come up with a dedicated solution for you.” – Peter Mbari, Technical Director, Blink Electrics Ltd.

The pumping station is located at the international Kenya airport, about 4 kilometers from the water treatment station and water storage tanks. Prior to modernization, the old system required its administrators to constantly overcome distances each time there was a need to turn on or off the water pumps in the power stations. An additional element that forced frequent moving of the service personnel was the fact that the efficiency of  the treatment station was smaller than the pump station. Before the installation of the telemetric system, when the pumping station was brought to life, there were frequent cases of overfilling of the tanks due to excess water flow in the treatment station, and as a consequence of this, the large amounts of water was being spilled. The process of dispensing chemicals also took place manually and often resulted in the operator adding amounts of chemicals improper in relation to the volume of water. In the case of malfunctions, it usually took a long time before they were noticed and diagnosed.

This state of affairs quickly had to change. Telemetry solutions have been very helpful for years and have been successfully offered by Inventia all over the world. One of the local Kenyan companies, Blink Electrics took advantage of the basic functionality of the MT-100 module, which is the MT2MT buffer, which enables to build a system working in the so-called cascade. It enables direct data transfer between distant points without the required additional infrastructure in the form of a central server. Thanks to this, the water treatment station was directly synchronized with the pump station, so that the water is now pumped only when the level in the tanks is not full. This reduced significantly the waste of energy, chemicals for treatment and water itself by eliminating its leakages.

The dosing of chemicals into the water has also been coordinated with the pumping station so that chemicals now are only added when the water flows from the remote pumping station. This ensured a uniform water treatment process, thus maintaining the required level of quality while maintaining a high degree of reliability.

Using the capabilities of the MT-100 telemetry module PLC, the installation system monitoring logic was programmed, and added notifications in the form of SMS messages are sent to the service staff in the event of a failure. In addition, administrators of facilities can monitor the system in real time from a computer using the MTManager program utility, obtaining all relevant information about the installation status.

Peter Mbari, Blink Electrics ltd, Kenia