Plant diagnostics is a key element to ongoing plant reliability and productivity. Identifying some plant abnormalities is akin to spotting an individual animal in a herd of moving animals. It is dynamic and difficult to pinpoint.
The key to identifying abnormalities is:
1. Monitoring: tracking changes be they switches/contacts, analog range change or rate of change.
2. Speed: ability to discriminate to the ms what happened first.
3. Order of events: ability to view the list in accurate chronological order.
4. Visualisation: ability to review events rapidly to make corrective action.
This is an over-simplification as plants can have large interactive processes, but the order above is critically important. Being able to visualise alarms is useless if the order is inaccurate. Certain portions of the process can be viewed independently too – one large system is often less efficient that several smaller ones.
Monitoring is self-explanatory: analyse the process and monitor to key parameters.
Speed: depending on the process, use an event recorder to capture time with every event recorded.
Omniflex provides cost effective and simple alarm visualisation on a touch screen for quick in-plant diagnostics, complementing its Alarm Management product offerings. Using a Gantt chart as an HMI object, events and alarms can be visualised graphically by time of occurrence and duration. With a chart, users can clearly understand the time at which an event occurs and its duration in relation to other events on the system. Combining of the event log into a chart helps users to compare the frequency of events and alarms.
Other benefits of using Omniflex touch screen HMIs for alarm visualisation include:
• Over 250 different PLCs are supported.
• Customise existing alarm system for improved productivity.
• Operators can evaluate new alarms in relation to existing ones.
• Reduces operator stress by presenting a chronological view, which allows root cause diagnostics.
• Operators can discriminate the status of more alarms timeously.
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