A legacy of top quality projects
The past 27 years have seen us successfully deliver a diverse range of small and large scale projects across Southern Africa, on time, on brief and – more often than not – well within budget:
Zuikerbosch Purification Station (+Image)
Autotronix was appointed by Rand Water, the largest bulk water utility in Africa and one of the largest in the world, to upgrade the carbon dioxide control platform (System 4) at the Zuikerbosch Purification Station providing bulk potable water to more than 11 million people. Due to operational requirements that necessitated the use of multiple treatment regimes, and ageing instrumentation and control equipment, water quality was compromised. The scope of work ranged from designing, manufacturing and installing stainless steel pipe-work in accordance with ASME B31-Part 3, to upgrading all automation equipment such that it could operate on the local HMI and remote SCADA systems via Profibus and Ethernet networks. This upgrade resulted in the station’s ability to dose carbon dioxide gas from 3 kg/h to 1 000 kg/h accurately while the new distributed PLC control system is providing for easy operation and maintenance with extra SCADA functionality and uniformity introduced. All equipment at the Zuikerbosch Purification Station now interfaces with the HMI at the carbon dioxide dosing bays or SCADA in the control room via Ethernet and Profibus DP and PA networks (hardwired signals to the PLC were replaced by the Profibus network).
Lower Thukela Water Scheme (+image)
Autotronix has designed, installed and commissioned the electrical control and instrumentation system that is in use at the Lower Thukela Bulk Water Supply Scheme (LTBWSS), a large bulk potable water infrastructure project in KwaZulu-Natal that supplies potable water to various towns within the iLembe District. The overall project was undertaken by Veolia Water, with Autotronix as its sub-contractor. The scope of the Autotronix contract included the supply of all electrical equipment, control and visualisation products for a control system that will automate the abstraction, treatment and distribution processes of the plant. The Autotronix team introduced ground-breaking techniques and have set new standards with reusable objects that have been tried and tested. The automation design of the plant has resulted in only a few staff required to operate the plant, clearly illustrating Autotronix’s expertise in providing a quality control system to the end user.
Controlling and reducing energy costs at Silicon Technology (+image)
Silicon Technology is situated at Ballengeich, south of Newcastle, in northern KwaZulu-Natal. The plant produces ferrosilicon, an alloy of iron and silicon, for the steel industry where it is used in the refining of steel. The plant has two furnaces, a raw material system and the final products crushing and screening plant and is a large consumer of power, resulting in the company paying large charges to Eskom. The monthly energy bill forms a significant part of Silicon Technology’s production costs so it engaged Autotronix to replace the existing energy management system with a new Mitsubishi PLC-based system with a Wonderware SCADA to display and report on energy consumption. In order to improve the control system even further, Silicon Technology identified that the furnace could be optimised to reduce energy consumption. To ensure seamless communication and integration, regular project technical meetings were held where progress was evaluated. The scope of the work was multidisciplinary and ranged from designing, programming, installing and commissioning the system so that it could be operated on both local HMI and remote SCADA via Ethernet. Autotronix converted its existing energy management software for the PLC using the Mitsubishi GX IEC 1131.3 programming software with detailed documentation generated to explain the operation and functionality. New graphics were developed to display plant status information to the operators and to enable the operators to control the plant more easily. The existing industrial fibre-optic Ethernet network was used for the PLC and SCADA communication, allowing easy connectivity to other equipment and computers in the plant. The most pressing need of utilising the maximum allowable power allocation from Eskom without actually exceeding the quota, has been achieved with the new system alerting and inhibiting Silicon Technology when approaching their upper level energy consumption limit.