In 2007 and 2008 Sydney Water Corporation as part of its Priority Sewage Program (PSP) designed and constructed a sewage system to service the townships of Brooklyn, Dangar Island and Gosford Council areas of Peat Island, Moonie Moonie and Cherrio Point, located on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. Due to the sensitivity of the oyster growing industry in the Hawkesbury a sealed low-pressure system and a membrane bioreactor was chosen.
One of the design requirements given to PSP was that the plant and system had to be remotely controlled with as little face-to-face operations time as possible. It had to be integrated into the Hornsby Treatment Team operations, which already operated two large plants 25 kilometres away. The plant had to meet Sydney Waters Sequence Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) Standards. Due to the remote control requirement the standard “black box” normally given with a membrane plant such as this had to be unravelled and directly programmed into Brooklyn's SCADA.
This paper talks about the challenges of manning the operations, automation, programming and controlling a complex plant and system with those design requirements.
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