הנדסת מים

בית גבריאל, צמח. 0 41 Cathodic Protection - case study Mekorot- Israel גדעון סלע מנכ״ל חברת א.ג.מ תקשורת ובקרה agm@agm.co.il The challenge: It is estimated that more than $30 billion in corrosion damage occurs in water and wastewater handling systems each year. One of the proven technologies for controlling corrosion is cathodic protection. Cathodic protection (CP) is a technique used to control the corrosion of a metal surface by making it the cathode of an electrochemical cell. Cathodic protection systems prevent corrosion of the protected structure only when they function properly. As a result, their design should incorporate numerous test stations and rectifiers stations that needs to be testes often tomake sure that the system is operating as intended. All sites are remotely located and not easy to maintain. Some sites have better communication coverage, while others suffer from poor communication coverage. All sites are installed externally with very high temperature inside the cabinets epically during the Israeli summer (more the 60degrees Celsius). Some of the equipment is new, some of it is more the 40 years old. The problem: Mekorot faced several issues with its CP projects: 1. Hardware reliability: cellular modems were not functioningor goingoutof service, power suppliers just stoppedworking, electronics were miss-performing and other hardware issues. 2. Cloud-based management solution that cause the following: a. An absolute dependency on our vendor b. Closed management system (vendor provided) that does not allow in house changes with limited flexibility 3. Clock synchronization: the CP department required clock synchronization in order to perform its test in real time. In CP it is required to measure the current and other variablesat exactly the same timeat different location along the pipes. Mekorot current solution does not provide this option. The solution: Mekorot CP and SCADA departmentmanagers made a market research and brought several outside solution providers to present their solutions. Among them was AGM Communication & Control. AGM offered its R-Win unit - SCADA Network Manager, R-Win unit was the only solution in the market that did not require external server or cloud infrastructure and was the only one to offer a GPS based on Atomic clock synchronization that solved the problem for the CP test. Mekorot chose to implement R-Win theproject. The results: Solusion benefits were: • Flexiblemanagement systemthat connects flawlessly with the existing SCADA system without any changes or the need to write new communication code at the PLC level • Modbus master connection to legacy GE PLCs. • R-Win provide full flexibility to connect to any vendor using standard protocols • Noneed topurchase other RTUs or protocol converters • Onetimepayment onlywithnodependency on the vendor Mekorot decided to replace the existing hardware with R-Win units. Moreso, givingCPdepartment thesolution they wanted using the GPS Clock synchronization, made both all of all us happy.