No Downtime

Typically, UCOS can be installed with little or no downtime, depending on the process and site.

Some examples:

• Premcor's Mallory fuel terminal loaded trucks continuously during the cutover to UCOS.
• The Irving Oil Revere terminal was down for only 45 minutes during the cutover to UCOS.
• The Newark paper plants cutover to UCOS in just a few hours each.
• A large pipeline cutover a metering station to UCOS in four hours and a pump station in eight hours.
• The City of Phoenix cutover its Cave Creek water treatment plant to UCOS with no interruption to the process.

The Cave Creek plant was the first water treatment site that CSI cutover to UCOS with the City of Phoenix.

The project manager recently told WaterWorld magazine, "We started there by creating a 'maintenance of plant operations' document which detailed the functionality of each of the plant's four controllers. With that information, I could then determine the best sequence in which to replace the old controllers with UCOS field control units (FCUs).

"At Cave Creek we replaced an obsolete and unsupported GE/Parsons-XLS DCS with UCOS but did not replace any of the OPTO-22 I/O. This saved thousands of dollars because none of the I/O had to be rewired, tested, or debugged.

The Cutover was Done Live

"No fieldwork was required at this site, and the cut-over was done live, so there was no downtime for the system conversion. This was important in that the Enhanced Surface Water Treatment regulations require the plants to remain '100% operational,' and that plant continued to reclaim four to six million gallons of water each day during cut-over.

"In all, 2,500 real-world I/O points and 1,000 Modbus protocol points are controlled by three operator workstations, employing 135 HMI screens. What took us eight and a half days to cut over would have taken at least three months, if not longer, for a standard PLC system, and cut-over would have been tedious and difficult, at best. It is also doubtful that a live cut-over could even be engineered in three months with a PLC system.

"By not having to rewire any existing hardware, we removed part of the human error element from the equation, and since this UCOS project is pre-configured and pre-tested we were able to check our system interface in a matter of minutes.

"While preparing for the Cave Creek cut-over, we also developed and implemented new procedures and standards that will make all future cut-overs run even more smoothly."

You can read the entire article online at WaterWorld magazine.