The country of Nicaragua is heavily investing in renewable energy projects. One of these projects is the geothermal power plant in the Cordillera de Maribios mountain range, a 70-km-long active volcano chain lining the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. The US-based company Ram Power executed the project.
[sidebar id =1]A very cost-effective and efficient system for extracting geothermal energy is using single-flash condensing turbine technology. In single-flash technology, high pressure and temperature geothermal brine (mostly water and steam) “flashes” into a low-pressure separator. The steam is sent to the turbine to generate power and then injected back into the geothermal reservoir to be reheated.
The geothermal brine is extracted at well pump stations that are miles away from the central control building. The process application that controls each well pump is designed as a self-contained Control-In-the-Field (CIF) system. The CIF concept is at the heart of FOUNDATION Fieldbus technology and does not require the use of a PLC/DCS syste
[sidebar id =2]In order to integrate this device-level control system with the remote control center, a gateway is required that:
- Acts as a FOUNDATION Fieldbus link master,
- Provides configuration access, and
- Enables data exchange between the fieldbus devices and the remote control system over Ethernet.
Softing's Linking Device and Gateway is designed to address all three requirements and represented the ideal solution for Power Ram to implement a cost-effective and low-maintenance control architecture.
For more information, please visit the Softing website.
