Thames Water, Tideways

Thames Water, Tideways. The Tideways project is a 22km long tunnel for gathering waste water from London with a population of around 10 million. The waste water drains to the eastern end of the tunnel by gravity and is then pumped 80 m vertically up to Europe’s largest sewage treatment plant

Products:

ISC system a combination of a hydraulic control system with integrated and programmed PLC

Our Brief:

To design, build, install and commission a hydraulic cylinder along with its hydraulic and electrical controls that operates the main isolation gate from the main tunnel. The cylinder is mounted 80m down the bottom of the main shaft and will open and close a roller gate that controls the flow of waste water. The shaft can flood such that our cylinder will be submerged up to 80 m deep in waste water and still have to operate for up to 14 days. When the shaft was drained the cylinder would still have to operate but in an explosive environment.

What we did:

The hydraulic cylinder had to be fitted with bot limit switches and a 4 – 20 mA feedback device. Both had to work at depths of 80 m and both had to be hazardous area rated. We found that suppliers of such electrical items offered a submersible version but only to depths of 4 m for 2.5 hours. We developed and built a series of protective cases for the electrical items and then had them hyperbarically tested to prove to the client that the devices were suitable for the parameters laid down in the contract. The design passed the customers tests and have been in service for over 6 years with regular flooding of the shaft taking place.

We designed the electrical panels and wrote the software to control the hydraulic pump unit and cylinder and integrated it with the customers SCADA system.

We provided full installation of the equipment and commissioning services.

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