A Study on Automatic Control Systems for Seawater Desalination Plants

해수 담수화 플랜트 제어 시스템 구성 방안 연구

Recently, the plant industries are being activated and plant control systems use various technologies. Because the optimized design for the plants is very important for the reducing of operation and maintenance costs, automatic control systems become more important. Plant control systems consist of the master controller, the plant networks, the programming environment for engineering, monitoring software and the field devices. The control systems should have reliability, availability and safety. Modular architecture of hardware and software makes flexible configuration of the control systems. Each component should have diagnostic functions. It follows industrial standards and makes open systems. Open systems increase accessibility against the data which is distributed in the plants. The controllers including processor and communication modules use the up-to-date technology. They have real time and fault tolerant function by duplicating processors or networks. It also enables to make the distributed control systems. The distributed architecture makes more scalable main control system. Automatic control systems can be operated with better performance. In this paper, we analyzed the requirements of the seawater desalination plants and made some consideration facts for developing the optimized controller. Also we described the design concept of the main controller, which consists of several modules. We should validate and complement the design for the reliability and better performance.