Automation of the Oguz-Gabala-Baku water pipeline, Azerbaijan

City of Baku

Baku Water Authority

The Oguz-Gabala-Baku water pipeline project dates back to plans from the 1970’s. Baku’s growth was historically driven by the booming oil industry and required the import of drinking water from outside of the city. Before the construction of the pipeline, some 60 percent of the city’s households received water for only a few hours daily. After completion of the project, 75 percent of the two million Baku residents are now served around the clock with potable water, based on World Health Organization (WHO) standards. The 262-kilometer pipeline requires no pumping station, but uses the altitude differences between the Caucasian mountains and the capital to supply 432,000 m³/d to the Ceyranbatan water reservoir. To the people of Baku, the pipeline is “the most important project not only in 2010, but of the last 20 years.”

The project was realized in cooperation with CASPEL, a regional system integrator specializing in solutions for data transfer, software development and supply, and maintenance of state-of-the-art IT hardware and software from leading manufacturers. Siemens supplied the automation technology for the pipeline project. For the comprehensive monitoring of water pipes and avoidance of potential emergencies, CASPEL installed a SIMATIC WinCC control and data management system. CASPEL adjusted the connected IT system and ensured that global standards were met. Major reconstruction work was carried out at various sites of Baku’s water system. The Siemens automation solution is based on the SIMATIC product suite: SIMATIC S7-1200 and SIMATIC S7-300 were installed for the control of the pipeline gate valves and in order to collect the flow meter data for leak detection. The flow meters were implemented with SIMATIC PDM. The HART protocol was applied for the relevant communication. The visualization and supervision of the entire plant was realized based on SIMATIC WinCC. The SIMATIC S7-300, positioned at the 75 wells in the higher region, communicate via GPRS modems with the redundant SIMATIC WinCC OS Servers in the central station, while the different stations along the pipeline are connected by redundant fiber optic cable ring.

• [Management Effectiveness - Operation Transparency]
  

  Easy and central monitoring of the whole system thanks to implemented GPRS and fiber optic technology, leading to increased transparency of pipeline operation

• [Process Optimization - Predictive Maintenance]
  

  Early fault detection thanks to better diagnostic functions, reporting and archiving of events such as online reporting of leak-detection system alarms

• [Efficiency Improvement - R&D]
  

  Reduced engineering time/cost thanks to easy and efficient configuration. Easy integration thanks to open standards

• 262 kilometer pipeline to supply 432,000 m³ of potable water to two million Baku residents

• More than 100 control locations with two water flow stations

• Percentage of population receiving continuous supply of drinking water increased from 40 to 75 percent