Monitoring plantwide with scada is common but this has extended to larger geographic areas and even to countrywide applications. Omniflex has been involved with telemetry and data acquisition since the company started more than 35 years ago. Over this time a considerable amount of expertise has been developed to overcome the technological challenges of implementing these systems.
Maxiflex has developed networking hierarchies to accommodate telemetry and data acquisition at any level - from the plant floor or those hard to reach areas - to the plant backbone running Ethernet. Communication options like wireless in some applications, cable based in others or a mixture of the two needs to be accommodated. The ability to seamlessly integrate between the options was of prime importance. In addition, response time of the system has become a crucial component in some applications. The simple poll response mechanism proves to be inadequate for response time critical applications. Unsolicited message transmission from outstations means the network is used more efficiently, however, even this can be compromised by outstations with faulty inputs ie, a chattering relay. Multiple channel processing to data concentrators provide superior performance and increased availability of outstation information due to its architecture.
Overview of the structure from fieldbus level through to main backbone
The Data Concentrator allows multiple sub networks to be supported in concurrent mode to a higher-level network. In addition it supervises the activities on the sub networks gathering data for the supervisory systems at the highest levels above. The Maxiflex data concentrator can be configured without writing any programs or can have application software running for each sub network. Where this proves useful is where large amounts of data require collection from different register locations or many different devices on the network. To make the network more efficient, these registers or data can be compacted into contiguous registers for the supervisory system to read. This makes the network more efficient. The Data Concentrator can also store configuration data for outstations and update them automatically if the outstation CPU or I/O is changed.
Maxiflex data concentrator
The integration of many different outstation and front-end devices can be accommodated into a single system with very little effort. The system is thus suitable for many utilities industries from electrical through to water.
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