Water intake SCADA and telemetry for a mining and processing plant

The brief

A processing plant drew its water from four intake stations spread over several kilometers of difficult terrain. Each ran locally with periodic manual inspection, which meant faults were discovered on the next visit rather than when they happened.

What we did

We designed a telemetry and SCADA layer connecting all four stations to the plant’s central control room. Each station received a local PLC that runs its own pumps autonomously, plus instrumentation for level, flow, pressure and motor condition. The central SCADA aggregates the four, presents them as one facility, and holds the historian.

Pump control logic covers duty rotation by running hours, automatic changeover on fault, dry-run protection from level and pressure interlocks, and staged start to keep inrush inside the supply limit.

Delivery notes

The design assumption we insisted on was that the communications link would fail, because over that distance it would. Every station is autonomous by default: it holds its last validated setpoints, keeps running its duty schedule, buffers its history locally, and re-synchronizes when the link returns. The SCADA layer is for visibility and adjustment, never a dependency for the plant to operate.

That decision was tested in the first winter, when the link dropped for most of a day. The intake ran through it without intervention.