Pilmuir pumping station is a flood alleviation scheme to protect the town of Forres in Scotland. In the event of a flood water is pumped away from the town into the river Findhorn by three independent variable speed pumps.
The control system uses a Siemens S7-400H hot-standby PLC with duplicate ET200M remote I/O stations and a touchscreen HMI. Due to the high availability requirements of this site, Profibus diagnostics were used to detect any problems with the I/O cards and hot-standby system and report the fault.
A remote access device was fitted to allow remote commissioning and maintenance via a VPN tunnel over the Internet. This also provided a facility for data logging and alarm dial out.
