Sequence of event recorders (SER) or sequence of event monitors (SOE) play a significant role in monitoring and maintaining critical infrastructure. By logging alarms and events in real time and in chronological order, they provide visibility to users and help identify the root cause of problems that may occur. Gary Bradshaw, director at remote monitoring equipment specialist, Omniflex, outlines the applicable industries and reasons for use.
The early SER products would provide 1 millisecond time stamps of the alarm and events they were monitoring, and the results would have been printed via an inbuilt printer so that the alarm or events list could be printed on paper for analysis. The logging of alarms and events has since progressed with SOE monitoring being done to sub-millisecond time stamps and the results being logged to a local or remote scada or distributed control system (DCS). These systems are applicable to all critical infrastructure industries, including oil and gas, nuclear, energy and utilities, manufacturing, data centres and healthcare.
All of these critical industries could have situations where one alarm or event could trigger a series of others extremely quickly afterwards. This technology allows users to identify the possible cause of the problem very quickly. This would usually be at the first alarm and not the subsequent ones, helping to diagnose any issues in a timely manner.
SOE provides better forensics to users and the ability to audit data properly afterwards. By addressing the main cause, this not only prevents catastrophic failures associated with hazardous industries, but also provides the ability to pinpoint a problem at the earliest stage. This allows repairs and preventative maintenance to be conducted before any major damage occurs, and also reduces troubleshooting and downtime, improving safety and providing major savings. This is especially useful for any operation that requires power distribution management – such as national infrastructure projects or data centres.
Omniflex has been a world leader is supplying SER and SOE systems
The Maxiflex 32SOE Digital Input Module provides a timestamp within 200 microseconds of the alarm event happening, which is far quicker than older SER systems. This allows for much better accuracy in locating the first alarm if multiple alarm events occur in quick succession.
The Maxiflex 32SOE is an intelligent module equipped with a spike filter to prevent noise from generating false alarm events on the input, and a debounce filter for inputs that have contact bounce problems. Using multiple 32SOE modules can allow SOE systems to be constructed with up to 480 time-stamped inputs per node with no limit on the number of nodes, providing very large distributed systems. Multiple nodes can be GPS time synchronised, such as the larger distributed systems like the ones Omniflex has provided on offshore gas platforms in the North Sea. Over 3500 distributed alarms and events associated with the generators and compressors were all individually monitored in the local scada system and all timestamped to 200 microseconds resolution.
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