Visualization and control of the Nishat Mills Bhikhi power plant in Pakistan

January 14, 2016 | Reliance SCADA

Established in 1951, Nishat Mills Limited is one of the most important textile companies in Pakistan. They use the most modern equipment for textile dyeing and processing. The company's production facilities are focused on spinning, weaving, processing, stitching, and power generation.

In 2015, Alpha Engineering installed a SCADA-based control system at the Nishat Mills Bhikhi power plant (17 MW).

Control system

The system consists of a control cabinet and the Reliance SCADA/HMI system. The control cabinet houses two PLC devices (Siemens SIMATIC S7-1200 PLC and Mitsubishi
MELSEC-Q Series), which communicate with 21 Janitza power analyzers to acquire data from eight gensets (3 x Daihatsu, 4 x Caterpillar, 1 x Wärtsilä), three STPs, and ten feeders. This data is also fed to the Wärtsilä control system in real time. The Reliance SCADA system provides an overview of the entire power plant (displaying load flow as trends and reports, monitoring the status of the generators/feeders, data logging). A replica of this system is also installed at Nishat Mills in Faisalabad.

The Reliance 4 system is used as front-end SCADA software. The Siemens SIMATIC S7-1200 PLC collects data from the power analyzers over Profibus while the Mitsubishi MELSEC-Q Series PLC is used to interface active power signals with the Wärtsilä control system. Both PLCs communicate with the Reliance system over Ethernet.

The Reliance SCADA system provides monitoring and control of the following:

• Graphics-oriented operator screens displaying important information obtained from different types of gensets
• Feeders' status and electrical parameters
• Electrical parameters of the gensets
• Real-time and historical trending of all the important parameters
• Archiving of reports, alarms/events, and trends

The reports provide, for example, information on daily and monthly amounts of kWh of energy produced by the generators and consumed through each feeder or information on daily active power variations in an easy-to-understand manner. These figures are also used to calculate line losses.

Examples of visualization windows

The main visualization window; it indicates the status and active power of the gensets and feeders including a trend at the bottom

Visualization of the feeders' status and all electrical parameters including a trend showing the total load flow and active power of each feeder

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