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Millenium Stadium
SCADA Solution
Customer environment & needs
Customer profile:
The Millennium Stadium (Welsh: Stadiwm y Mileniwm) is the 74,500 seater
national stadium of Wales, located in the capital, Cardiff. It is the home of the
Wales national rugby union team and the Wales national football team but is
also host to many other large scale events. It was built ready for Cardiff to
host the 1999 Rugby World Cup.
Customer objective and constraints:
Project Overview
- Market segment: Education / Government
- Application(s):
- Power management
- Country: United Kingdom
- Year order: 2008
- Duration: 6 days to deliver a SCADA solution
to manage the retractable roof for the
Millenium stadium
The fully retractable roof at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff is one of the venue's best- known and most appreciated features.
However, after seven years of operation, the roof's control system, which had provided sterling service, was becoming
increasingly difficult to maintain and support. In particular, the existing SCADA system was a bespoke package for which support
was no longer available, and the HMI panels used to initiate and monitor the roof's operations were obsolete and incapable of
further enhancement.
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Results
Customer benefits:
The customer gains peace of mind that what ever the weather is like outside the stadium, they can shut the roof - or not.
(Dependent on how wet or dry they want the pitch) All the produccts and software work together and the solution was provided by one organisation, making amendments and
enhancements to the exisiting system quick and easy to do.
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Solution
Implementation methodology (main phases):
Understand the current solution and retrofit in a new SCADA offer utilising the latest Schneider Electric products and software
including; Unity programmable controllers, HMI panels and a version of Citect SCADA..
Solution overview (services, products, systems, architectures…):
To remedy this situation, Schneider Electric, Services & Projects, was invited to submit proposals for a new and more versatile
control system that would also provide a high level of future proofing.
As a preliminary step, the requirements of the application were analysed. The roof opening and closing operations are driven by
eight hydraulic winches, each of which is equipped with proportional valves to provide speed control. The speed of the winches is
monitored by shaft- mounted encoders, which are also used for alignment control and to initiate misalignment alarms.
Overall control for the existing system was provided by an obsolete Modicon Atrium programmable controller, originally supplied
by the Telemecanique brand of Schneider Electric, and the operator interface was provided by Magelis electronic HMI units, also
from Telemecanique. Again, these products were obsolete. Finally, the SCADA system used bespoke software that could neither
be extended nor maintained.
Schneider Electric, Services & Projects, proposed a solution based on the latest Unity programmable controller, accompanied by
one 15- inch XBTGT HMI unit for the main display and controls, plus four smaller auxiliary XBTGT HMI units, one of which would
be mounted in each of the four winch houses.
Since all of these new items, like those in the original system, were products from the brands of Schneider Electric this approach
had the benefit that, in principle at least, the existing software could be converted, thereby avoiding the expense and
inconvenience of having to re- write it from scratch.
Having been awarded the contract on the basis proposed, Schneider Electric, Services & Projects, began the work of converting
the programs. The conversion process proved to be straightforward for the control program, with the only hitch being an
undeclared variable error that was quickly remedied.
The situation was slightly more involved for the HMI panels, where the age and design of the small units originally used in the
winch rooms meant that the software could not be directly converted. Re- writing was, however, only a minor task as the functions
of these units are straightforward and, apart from addressing, the software in each of the four units is identical.
For the large HMI panel, the situation was complicated by password protection on data files used by the original software.
Unfortunately, the passwords were not available, and password hacking proved ineffective. As a result, the data files that, for
example, scale the roof position information, had to be regenerated.
An important requirement of the project was that the new HMI panel should present information in a way that was as close as
possible to the display used by the original SCADA system. This was Windows- based and controlled using a mouse and
keyboard.
The main challenges were to fit all of the graphics on the screen while incorporating the navigation buttons, and to animate the
graphic of the roof opening and closing, bearing in mind that the scaling of the signals from the encoders was originally done in the
old SCADA system. Fortunately, the powerful Magelis programming tools made it possible to address these challenges easily and
efficiently.The hardware changeover presented challenges of a different nature, since the work had to be carried out when no
events were scheduled at the Stadium, which meant that strict deadlines had to be observed. In the event, installing the new
hardware and software, and the commissioning process took less than five days, in spite of the winch houses and the control room
being separated by a very long walk.
A trial roof opening had, in fact, been scheduled for the final day but was actually achieved a day early, leaving only minor fine
tuning to be completed on the fifth day.
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