Summary

The Paalaa Kai Treatment Plant was one of the first major projects that I have completed in my IT career. It was the cumulation of my tenure at the City and County of Honolulu as their PLC Programmer. The major objective of my employment at the City was to evaluate whether or not the Mitsubishi SCADA suite was a viable solution to their operation. I had already determined that the Mitsubishi Suite was not suitable for cross-platform interaction with Rockwell. But, the Mitsubishi platform is a viable option for a smaller plant site.

When I first went to the Paalaa Kai Treatment Plant, all of their operations were done through actuating physical buttons and mechanisms. Typically, a matured plant operating process involve operators interacting with a Human Machine Interface (HMI) device which in turns send the actions to the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). A project was proposed and carried by the City and County of Honolulu, Wastewater Division, to modernized Paalaa Kai Treatment Plant.

I was assigned to the project to modernize the Paalaa Kai Treatment Plant. In order to support and build the Mitsubishi HMI and PLCs to operators' operation procedure, I took multiple trips to the Plant and reviewed its' processes. From reviewing the plant processes and talking to the operators, I built the HMI to the specifications of the process - From the beginning Pretreatment to the Injection Wells (its' current end process). After I came up with the prototype, I asked for feedbacks from the operators and redesigned the graphics based on their recommendations.

It was a humbling and exciting experience for me to implement and design the entire local SCADA system at Paalaa Kai. The rapport that I made with the operators at both the remote and local SCADA site are one of the highlight that I had during my tenure there. When the system was installed at the site and I saw the operators working with it, I was ecstatic to see the result of my year long work of learning and understanding Control and Electrical Engineering (Writing Ladder Logic and wiring Analog and Digital Modules in the PLC) come to fruition.

At the moment of the installation of the system at Paalaa Kai, the network module to bring the data from the local site to the SCADA Control Center was not implemented. If I had the chance to implement Phase II, then I would have brought the network connectivity from its' underlying City and County infrastructure. SCADA systems are typically run and monitor remotely from Control Center. Data from the system are historically stored on its' own local database and a remote database and that would have been a part of Phase II.

Overall, this is was one of the most challenging and fun project that I have had the pleasure of completing and deploying.

Presentation of Design