The Melbourne Underground Rail Loop (MURL) Fire and Life Safety System Upgrade project involved the design, installation and commissioning of a Smoke Management System at each of the three MURL underground stations.
Fire and Life Safety System Criticality
Siemens S7-1518HF CPU Type Approval
CMS Development Environment
Station Periphery
Design Management
Testing and Commissioning
Challenges
Customer Insights
Fire and Life Safety System Criticality
The Smoke Management System reduces or eliminates hazards caused by smoke or fire at the station by extracting smoke through the draught relief shafts at each station, making the stations safer for users.
Siemens S7-1518HF CPU Type Approval
To apply for Type Approval (TA) of the Siemens high availability failsafe PLC CPU for use in a SIL 2 system, Parasyn contributed to the SPA / MTM process by gathering and assessing required relevant information about the device (pair). In addition, formal form submission and corresponding cataloguing of the provided digital information formed part of the activities. Besides answering some minor questions soon after submission, there were no requests for more information from the approval team as it was considered sufficiently thorough. Full Type Approval was granted some months later, after passing the provisional and then full approval stages.
CMS Development Environment
Parasyn was largely responsible for the design and setting up of the test and development environment for the control system, including SMCS, BMS and CMS components at an unused building section at Flinders St station. Design included the networking, 19” rack layouts, power distribution and calculations, PLC I/O wiring, room configuration and heat dissipation calculations. Parasyn collaborated with and supervised various parties, including MTM and external contractors for implementing the test network and inter-connecting to local station networks, and for provision of AC power and air-conditioning. Parasyn undertook the configuration and integration of the various PLC systems. At various stages, additions were made to the test equipment, as well as sourcing and supplying of scarce PLC components.
Station Periphery
As Parliament Station sliding doors integration into the control system were required, Parasyn undertook the investigation and solution optioneering for that purpose. This involved finding and collaborating with the parties involved with the installation and maintenance of the sliding doors, including interfacing to the associated control boards and cable landing advice. The solution was documented, subsequently implemented, and has since functioned successfully.
Design Management
During Gate 1, Gate 2 and IFC phases of the project, Parasyn was integral to the CMS network design, control system design, and design reports. Activities also included document reviews and provision of critical review feedback.
Testing and Commissioning
Parasyn was engaged to support the Principal System Integrator in commissioning and testing activities, including fine tuning the control system, troubleshooting, and reviewing test procedures and providing performance feedback. Parasyn’s role was “owners engineer”.
Working mainly with Southern Program Alliance (SPA) and the Principal System Integrator (Synertec), commissioning required interfacing with various electrical and mechanical contractors.
Challenges
The complexity of the MURL Smoke Management System presented several challenges during the commissioning and testing phase of the project.
The system comprises of many field devices including dampers, mechanical fans, air handling units (AHU), variable speed drives (VSD), emergency power generators, chillers, pumps and valves. Integrating all these equipment into the centralise high availability safety control system involved detailed planning, effective coordination and good understanding of the overall system.
The long physical distances from the control panels to the field equipment made it difficult to trace wiring faults and time consuming to navigate from one equipment to another. Several equipment required further fine tuning from the manufacturer, which required additional testing to be repeated on the equipment.
Being a live system, there were challenges around the scheduling of testing and issues around introducing faults or unexpected behaviour to an operational system. The stations were critical as they were already fully operating sites servicing the public and monitored by the operators.
Customer Insights
The MURL Fire and Life upgrade is a one-of-a-kind project that requires the expertise and knowledge of some of the best Automation and control system consultants in the country. Parasyn were one of the control systems experts that were contracted on the Job.
Parasyn have proven to provide good experience and knowledge around the Siemens Simatic family of Industrial control hardware (PLC S7-1500, Scalance, HMIs, RIOs) and were pivotal in the testing, commissioning and more importantly trouble shooting issues via the TIA portal.
Examples of this:
• Parasyn were able to troubleshoot a lingering issue regarding the PLC to PLC communication within a station. Working with the principal contractor they were able to identify underlying networking issues previously missed by the principal contractor and also setup correct network protocols to allow for PLC to PLC comms. This was critical at the time due to the issues causing hold ups in other aspects of our project commissioning.
• During the early commissioning phase, Parasyn’ s knowledge on Siemens TIA portal helped them Identify several incorrectly wired devices on the field using the various graphical programming languages in TIA portal. This greatly aided in speeding up the project timeline as well as ensuring issues were identified and rectified promptly whilst also verifying the PLC code was synonymous with the Control Philosophy.
In conclusion, Parasyn were pivotal to the completion of this project and their knowledge around Siemens devices, Programming and networking ultimately accelerated and shortened our project timeline.
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