This particular project marks the first full blown BlueLine upgrade in South America.

Photo: Courtesy Juan-Carlos Barragan

Executed in December 2009, this project tackled the removal of the original ABB made Taylor MOD300 control system, which was comprised of turbine open loop, protection and all HMI systems. A number of ancillary components were replaced at the same time.

The biggest challenge during a project of this size is the I/O count and the associated wiring jobs, see below picture with the Harting plugs:

Once the joy of wiring is over, the rest is a breeze. The pictures below show how the open loop and protection channels for the gas turbine control system looked like after installation was completed. Note: the only thing with "ABB" left on it is the waterhead, or, in proper terms, the SL unit.

Of course, you may have wondered about the high speed control system (HSCS) of the MOD. Well, the changes there are much less intrusive. We normally pull out all CPU's that have the ABB logo and stick our own ones in. This way, we make sure that all controllers in the system are of the same type. Also, we get rid of the bus traffic directors BV05 and replace them with TD01's. The photo below shows how it's done, although we realize that the photographer could have dressed it up a bit...

Visible from top to bottom is the following equipment: - 3 racks of the main governor, with redundant CPUs type CP01 (and also redundant Expresso modules, but more on that later) - 1 rack for protection channel 2 using a simplex controller CP01, and with redundant Expresso modules - 2 racks with Dekontic-k equipment, used for speed measurement acquisition, seismic vibration monitoring and the life time counter. On a side note, we would have also replaced the counter and the speed input

Data / control bus:

The deployed solution makes use of BlueLine's Expresso® high speed plant control bus. With its deterministic behaviour, the Expresso Bus is ideally suited to function as part of a gas turbine protection system. BlueLine's SIL3 safety certificate makes full use of this bus. The photo on the left shows the two Expresso gateway modules type DH02, which establish a data link for the two HMI servers.

HMI and Control Room Equipment

This is the new HMI server in the local control module A.	This is the main control room of the plant.