The iron and steel industry presents a number of challenges to the instrumentation vendor, particularly for temperature/process monitoring applications. Ranging from applications where temperatures are simply too hot for contact measurements to those with extreme electromagnetic interference from arc furnace smelters and applications having many hundreds of temperature measurement points. Harsh environmental conditions with corrosive gas and excessive ambient temperatures all contribute to the design tolerance required from instrumentation in these environments.
Omniflex offers many temperature monitoring solutions, from single point, through 16 points or 600 points and more with high-end specifications, at the same time providing cost effective solutions. The iron and steel industry has many critical temperature monitoring applications with the potential to cause or inflict tremendous loss if not monitored and controlled. Compatibility of the front-end temperature measuring system with a variety of supervisory systems is important.
Inputs and isolation
Input isolation from the field and inter channel isolation is crucial to ensuring reliable readings from the Plant. Omniflex offers single point solutions in the Omniterm range and high-density temperature monitoring system catering for hundreds of temperatures at once using Maxiflex with 1,5 kVRMS isolation from the field and 500 V inter-channel isolation. Maxiflex uses no multiplexing and no rotary switches. Temperature inputs may be any 3-wire RTD or thermocouples and are individually configurable for any RTD or thermocouple type. Cold Junction compensation and linearisation are all standard features. Special inputs like optical pyrometers can be catered for including linearisation to temperature if required.
Alarms and alarm annunciation
Alarm notification is important to the process operation, each temperature input has four Soft alarm setpoints allocated to it.
Rate of change alarming
The user can configure the option for rate of change alarms instead of setpoint alarms. Alarms and setpoints are configurable via the diagnostic/configuration tools or directly via scada or DCS. Setpoints can be mapped to physical outputs to provide local alarm and trip functionality or simply read from the scada.
Program-less environment
Maxiflex provides a program-less environment for data acquisition. The system is simply configured using Windows-based tools for the temperature input type and setpoints if required. No application programs are required; the temperature inputs are scanned automatically and are made available to scada or DCS via a data interchange table in the Maxiflex CPU. Temperatures can be represented in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit selected by the user.
Speed of data acquisition
Many scada and DCS systems are overburdened with I/O resulting in slow sample rates for data acquisition. Using front end data acquisition and direct network connections to the DCS or scada the workload is distributed and faster sampling can be made.
Local area network connections and supervisory systems
Networking on existing twisted pair cabling in the plant makes for easy retrofitting to difficult areas of a plant and allows distributed acquisition of temperatures. Multidropping up to 126 devices along a single twisted pair cable will provide the capacity a total of 2016 temperature channels on a single twisted pair cable. Ethernet gateways to supervisory systems are available and OPC servers allow all compatible scada packages to acquire the information from Maxiflex field devices. Supervisory systems can then use the data for pro-active plant management.
Some larger Maxiflex applications:
* Boilers and boiler skin temperatures.
* Kilns and rotary kilns.
* Gasifier skin monitoring.
* Reactor/cracker temperature monitoring.
* Plastics moulding.
* Furnace monitoring.
* Temperature profiles and curing.
* Pump station motor winding and bearing temperature monitoring.
* Power station temperature monitoring.
Cost-effective solutions and benefits
Maxiflex provides significant cost savings for high-density temperature measurement, with pricing more competitive than hockey puck solutions for monitoring even before factoring the cable saving, the ability to integrate easily into supervisory and alarm/trip systems makes Maxiflex an attractive solution. System expansion is trivial and requires minimal configuration to commission being measured in hours compared with days on conventional systems and thus passing on the savings to the end-user.
Integration to local HMIs or alarm enunciators
Local HMIs can be used with Maxiflex to provide in-plant monitoring data to operational staff. Functionality of the system is varied and tailored to the application's needs. Maxiflex and a variety of local area network communications solutions including Ethernet to get the information back to supervisory systems easily deliver this. Local alarm and centralised alarm indication can be implemented with ease. Integration into Windows operating systems via OPC servers gives access to most scada packages on the market.
Building upon the 40 plus years of experience in the field of process automation and monitoring instrumentation for industry, Omniflex continues to provide solutions for many plant applications such as temperature monitoring.
For more information contact Ian Loudon, Omniflex, 031 207 7466, ianl@omniflex.com, www.omniflex.co.za
| Tel: | +27 31 207 7466 |
| Email: | sales@omniflex.com |
| www: | www.omniflex.com |
| Articles: | More information and articles about Omniflex Remote Monitoring Specialists |
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