Newcastle International Airport (NIA) is one of the United Kingdom's fastest growing regional airports and is the dominant airport in the North East of England. Since the arrival of low cost airlines in 2003, passenger numbers have soared with the airport handling over 68,000 flights and 5.2 million passengers in 2005. Passenger satisfaction, safety and security are the top priorities, but in addition Newcastle International Airport is committed to environmental issues.
NIA operate an Environmental Management System in line with the ISO 14001 standard, and all businesses partners of NIA must comply with the environmental regulations and NIA’s Environmental Policy.
One important aspect of NIA’s Environmental Policy is to ensure that contaminated surface water does not enter the local watercourses. Surface waste is at risk of being contaminated with de-icing fluid which is used on the airfield and aircraft. NIA have invested in excess of £1million in the polluted water diversion system on site, and continue to allocate resources, this includes a series of storage lagoons on the North and Southside of the Airport. The storage lagoons provide vital attenuation for surface water, where biodegradation can occur before it is discharged at a controlled rate to either foul or surface water.
Before entering the lagoons water initially enters a penstock, where the water is continuously tested by a Total Organic Carbon monitor. If the water is deemed ‘clean’ then it will be diverted to the local watercourse, alternatively ‘dirty’ water is directed to the lagoon. A further test takes place at the discharge end of the lagoon to determine whether it is sent to sewer or watercourse.
The lagoons and associated water quality monitors require continuous monitoring and regular maintenance to ensure correct operation. It is also critical that relevant personnel have access to various operational parameters and to the status of pumps, penstocks etc.
Previously a single PC collected data from the lagoons using conventional modems to transmit data over the airport’s telephone network. The main problem with this method was poor connection reliability and poor access to data. Due to the fact that the modems went off line when data was not being requested, information was not always readily available. Improvements were therefore sought to improve the reliability and accessibility of the control system.
Astral Control Services supply, install and maintain automatic control systems and are contracted to maintain the existing control equipment at Newcastle International Airport. As part of an upgrade to the Building Management System (BMS) commencing in 2006, Astral were instructed to connect the remote waste water treatment processes at the three lagoons to the new BMS with a view of helping to improve visibility and reliability.
A Cylon Unitron programmable controller with various I/O (inputs/outputs) for measurement and control equipment was installed at each of the three lagoons. A Westermo SDW-550 Ethernet switch connects the remote PLC’s back to the main BMS controller within the main terminal building. From here the information is made available via the airport intranet. The data collected at the lagoons is transmitted via Ethernet TCP/IP over the existing telephone network. Two Westermo DDW-100 line extenders are used (one at the lagoon and one in the control panel) to extend the network to reach the Penstock 3 lagoon, which is around 5Km from the main terminal. Once again the existing telephone network is used.
The use of web technology means that the BMS can be monitored or controlled from existing web browsers without the need for a special client software installation. The use of web technologies allows any number of users to be supported. Web control allows the smallest remotes sites to have some local monitoring and delegated control.
The Westermo DDW-100 is ideal for utilising existing wiring to link remote sites to a central industrial Ethernet network removing the need to install fibre optic cables for instance. The DDW-100 is capable of achieving high data rates (up to 2.3Mbit/s) over the 5km distances between each lagoon. In this circumstance the line extenders use the existing telephone cabling system to extend the centralised TCP/IP network (within the terminal building) out onto the runway. Essentially the Cylon BMS can make the information from the remote lagoons available seamlessly via the airport intranet to anyone with the correct username and password.
Having this data available is critical to meet environmental requirements. Improved visibility enabled not only the BMS services manager to monitor the results, but also enable the environmental officer, finance director and other internal members of staff to get access to the data (logs) via the airports intranet from any web browser.
“We wanted to extend the Airport’s Ethernet network to the remote lagoons rather than continue to use telephone modems. By extending this network we have brought the whole waste water treatment process information into the BMS, which is a crucial step towards fulfilling our environmental accounting policy” Newcastle International Airport
“The DDW-100 can send data over the existing telephone network, so we were able to reduce any new cabling costs considerably. The Westermo products also enabled communication over distances of up to 6.5 km - ideal for this project. Because they are designed for industrial environments and are very simple to install and configure, this made the networking task very simple indeed”, said Alan Jones, Project Engineering Director, Astral Control Services.