This month Yokogawa Electric Corporation commemorates the 30th anniversary of its Centum series production control system, a core product of its industrial automation (IA) business.
Yokogawa released what is believed to be the world's first distributed control system (DCS), the initial version of Centum, in June 1975. This version employed multiple microprocessors, each of which was assigned to different areas of the plant for effective risk distribution. By enabling plant operation and monitoring to be performed via CRTs, Centum helped operators work more efficiently while reducing both labour costs and instrumentation room space requirements.
Before the DCS was employed, plant control and monitoring was done via analog panel instruments. As a control and monitoring instrument had to be mounted on the display console for each control loop to facilitate testing, measurement, and the issuance of commands in response to test and measurement results, such consoles took up a lot of space and required many operators.
Since the first version was released, Yokogawa has continued developing new technologies and integrating them into succeeding versions of the Centum series in response to its users' need for greater scale, efficiency, and computerisation in plant control. The Centum series has contributed to the progress of all process industries, including the petroleum and chemical industries. Yokogawa reports that the total number of Centum systems installed for customers worldwide since 1975 has exceeded 10 000, making Centum one of the top brands in the international market.
The Centum CS 3000, the sixth and latest version of Centum, employs various revolutionary technologies such as Foundation Fieldbus and offers solutions for both plant control and plant-wide integration. Such production support solutions include:
* Exaquantum, a plant information management system that seamlessly integrates the production control system with the corporate management system.
* Exapilot, a plant operation efficiency improvement package that incorporates the expertise of skilled operators to create standardised, automated plant operation processes
* ProSafe-RS, a safety instrumented system that achieves complete integration with Centum CS 3000; until this product was released to the market in February of this year, the plant production control and safety instrumented systems functioned separately.
The Centum CS 3000 is a core building block of Yokogawa's VigilantPlant solutions, of which its makers say 'promises to bring operational excellence to visionary plants, creating an environment where plant personnel can see clearly, know in advance, and act with agility'. Yokogawa intends to become the world's leader in the IA business by the year 2010.
For more information contact Johan Pretorius, Yokogawa, 011 681 2560, [email protected], www.yokogawa.com/za
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