Automatic control and monitoring system for the district heating system at the University of Oradea, Romania

Abstract

The present geothermal installation system at the University of Oradea needs to be improved considerably; presently, the well potential is not utilized at maximum capacity, causing severe energy losses. Based on this situation, a project for modification of the existing system started. A part of these modifications is to implement an automatic control system for the whole installation system, which will ensure the optimum use of the energy of the geothermal water. In this paper a control system for the well station and the pump station for the geothermal plant at the University of Oradea is developed. A programme for Allen Bradley programmable logic controller (PLC) that controls the system is presented. There is also implemented and presented a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system for the controlled system, using the InTouch SCADA programme. Finally, the overall operation of the PLC programme and the SCADA system is tested.