CONCEPTUAL SPECIFICATION FOR IMPROVED AUTOMATION AND TOTAL PROCESS CARE IN LARGE-SCALE DESALINATION PLANTS OF THE FUTURE

The aim of this paper is to outline some concepts useful in the specif ication for improved automation and total process care in respect of l arge-scale desalination plants which are expected to arise in the futu re in view of the ever-growing demand for potable water in some of the arid regions of the vicinity of seawater resources. This work is moti vated by the fact that the current state of control.and automation in desalination plants conspicuously lags behind contemporary development s and is virtually stagnant with the continued use of decades-old conv entional techniques of feedback control. The ideas are based on the co nviction that recent advances in control, systems and information proc essing fields hold great promise of support in the task of providing a comprehensive system of advanced control and total process care in th e wake of growing complexity and size of such plants. The paper highli ghts the importance of advanced computational algorithms for the tasks of data reconciliation, optimization, control design, estimation, fau lt detection, diagnosis and other pathological functions. The architec ture of such an advanced system can be designed to possess a desired f orm of hierarchy having plant-wide coverage. The importance of the exi stence of an operator in appropriate places in the system is also emph asized in the proposed system. Features of artificial intelligence rec ommended here render the system flexible, versatile and capable of tac kling situations by a choice of strategies from among those provided, based on an analysis of the situations and the results obtained.