Over 500 of Rotork’s IQPro intelligent electric actuators have been supplied for valve control and operation throughout two new water treatment plants serving the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province. The new plants have a designed treatment capacity of 900 million l/day. The contract for the plants involved 480 IQ rotary and 60 IQT quarter-turn valve actuators. For the plants’ automation they are controlled by Allen Bradley PLCs connected to Intouch SCADA distributed control networks. Processes controlled encompass intake, settlement tanks, reverse gravity filter beds, contact tank dosing and distribution to the mains supply. Rotork IQPro actuators feature a large and comprehensive user display, with a customer configurable multilingual text capability, which is the interface for non-intrusive actuator setting, commissioning and interrogation by means of a hand-held setting tool. The illuminated window displays setting prompts and confirmation of setting data, local and remote control status and additional data including valve torque/position profiles. The hand-held setting tool, featuring bidirectional non-intrusive infra red communication, facilitates on-site actuator configuration with or without mains power connected. Bidirectional communication enables data to be retrieved and retransmitted to other actuators, saving time when many valves require near-identical commissioning. In addition, actuator data logger files can be downloaded and transported from plant to office for storage and analysis on a PC running Rotork IQ-Insight software. Effective asset management programmes can then be planned and implemented.
