Control system takes on radioactive water

Bechtel National has chosen ABB IndustrialIT as the plant wide control platform for the Department of Energy's (DOE) Hanford Waste Treatment Plant near Richland, WA.

Bechtel National has chosen ABB IndustrialIT as the plant wide control platform for the Department of Energy's (DOE) Hanford Waste Treatment Plant near Richland, WA.

The ABB IndustrialIT system is an integrated solution for Bechtel that includes hardware, software, consulting engineering services, on-site support and training.

According to Peter Douglass of Bechtel's Plant Wide Systems Evaluation Team, "The DOE's Waste Treatment Plant is a large scale facility which deals with continuous and batch processes as well as discrete manufacturing processes.

The challenge was to select a common platform suitable for all, at the same time being flexible enough to meet the project's physical installation and equipment procurement strategies.

ABB's IndustrialIT suite of solutions meets this challenge.

Bechetel National has a $4 billion, 10-year contract to design, build, and commission the world's largest radioactive waste processing plant.

The Waste Treatment Plant is a huge complex with three main processing facilities.

A pretreatment facility separates the waste feed into high-level radioactivity and low-activity streams.

The waste is then fed into separate high-level waste vitrification and low-activity waste vitrification facilities.

Limited construction on the Waste Treatment Plant began in October 2001.

Full construction authorisation is expected later this year with hot commissioning scheduled in 2007.

ABB will provide a plant-wide control solution with approximately 35,000 I/Os, with the possible expansion of up to 60,000 I/Os, making this one of the largest automation installations in the USA.

It will support additional I/O communicated from packaged subsystems as part of the overall database, alarming, and a human machine interface (HMI) system.

A variety of operator interface stations will be installed including dedicated control areas using large-screen terminals, as well as local operator stations distributed throughout the facility.

The control system will support batch processing (ANSI/ISA-S88.01) of wet processes and sequential control of mechanical handling equipment.

A CCTV system will be integrated with the ABB control for remote monitoring and control of the mechanical handling operations.

ABB's scope of supply includes ControlIT AC800M controllers, S800 I/O to interface both conventional and Foundation Fieldbus instruments, Windows 2000-based OperateIT operator interface software, ProduceIT batch management software, InformIT data management software, and the EngineerIT suite of engineering tools.

The control system will also interface with various plant information applications such as maintenance management, LIMS and others using enterprise-level databases.

ABB IndustrialIT solutions will help Bechtel reduce engineering costs through the efficiency and re-use capabilities of EngineerIT tools.

Bechtel will have the ability to integrate plant systems and information through the IndustrialIT Aspect/Object model.

"As the advantages of object oriented programming are rapidly becoming recognised in the plant automation business, ABB has taken this concept to the next level with Aspect Objects making it a powerful tool for engineers, operators and maintenance personnel" said Todd Billings of Bechtel's Plant Wide Systems Evaluation Team.

ABB is providing hardware, batch, and software development consulting engineering services and on-site technical support to assist Bechtel with functional and site acceptance testing.

ABB will also provide a comprehensive training program for engineers, operators and maintenance personnel on-site.

ABB hardware and software support includes warranty and upgrades over the full 10-year project implementation period.

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