With over 30 years of experience in the national energy market, Altus' engineering team has extensive experience in the development and integration of systems for energy generation, transmission and distribution. One of the initiatives we have recently been involved in was the modernization of the Digital Supervision and Control System (SDSC) of PCH Pai Joaquim, a project located on the banks of the Araguari River, in Minas Gerais. With a production capacity of 23 MW, the small hydroelectric plant is part of the energy production system of CEMIG, one of the main electricity concessionaires in Brazil.
In this project, Altus was responsible for the manufacture of the products and the development of the new SDSC for commissioning at the PCH. For the control application, two of our main product series were used: the Hadron Xtorm Remote Terminal Units and the Nexto Programmable Logic Controllers. While Hadron Xtorm RTUs, products developed specifically to meet the demands of the electric power industry, are responsible for controlling the generating unit, the Nexto Series products, our most advanced line of PLCs, act in the acquisition and transmission of signals between all devices that are part of the application, such as sensors, RTVX and the RTUs themselves.
The supervision application was developed using the SCADA/HMI BluePlant software technology. Altus' solution for supervision, control and data acquisition, BluePlant combines design, performance and high connectivity, has a client-server architecture with numerous options for the number of communication tags, as well as a simulator and debugging tools. As with the control system, all of the system's screens and logic were also designed and modeled by the experts on our engineering team.
The Pai Joaquim PCH modernization process, which began in late July with the installation of the PLC, the UTR and other control devices, also includes functional tests and the commissioning of the unit's new Digital Supervision and Control System. After replacing the current system, the PCH will be remotely controlled by operators based at the System Operations Center (COS-MG) in Belo Horizonte.
