In his column this month, Jim Pinto reviews the automation industry of the past and prognosticates on some of the possibilities that could evolve in the future. “Today’s factories and process plants are still a mess of conventional wiring, so it is an easy extrapolation to forecast the continued growth of industrial wireless.”
The growth of industrial wireless is inevitable and evident in the proliferation of solutions that is emerging, so much so that we will be running a feature on the subject in every second issue of SAI&C this year. Happening in parallel though, are the efforts of some of the major DCS suppliers to clean up this ‘mess of conventional wiring’.
DCS I/O subsystems responsible for inputting hundreds or thousands of different process measurements and outputting control signals to a large number of valves, actuators, motors and other plant final control elements represent a significant contribution to the overall system cost. Hence, suppliers are now working to reduce both the cost and the complexity of their I/O by incorporating more intelligence and programmability into the devices in an effort to add ever more value for their end users.
In this month’s feature article from contributing editor Andrew Ashton, we take a look at some of the smarts that DCS vendors have introduced to reduce installation effort and costs on greenfield sites as well as their retrofit solutions. On show are the latest offerings from Emerson, Honeywell and Invensys, creating some compelling cost benefits for those who embrace these new approaches to the age old problem of I/O management – see ‘Smarter marshalling’.
Beckhoff flights the machine
This issue’s cover story was a lot of fun for the SAI&C team and also relates to the subject of I/O management. We were invited to spend an afternoon at OR Tambo checking out the latest Jetstream 41 flight simulator and talking to one of the developers, Danie Kuys from local engineering outfit Simuflight. The cockpit data is primarily digital on this simulator; some 800 points need to be monitored in conjunction with the roll, pitch, yaw and power controls which are analogue. One of the design headaches was how to monitor all of this within the ‘every 50 msec’ design constraint. It turns out that PC-based control and the EtherCAT platform from Beckhoff Automation provided an ideal implementation that manages this I/O space autonomously, freeing the simulation computer to concentrate on the business of virtual flying – more in ‘Beckhoff flights the machine’.
The highpoint of the afternoon for the editors was getting behind the controls and taking the Jetstream for a ‘flip’ around a virtual OR Tambo International. We did not do too badly on takeoff and managed to stay right side up during flight, the landing was really flaky though. We dropped one of the wings too low on touchdown, smashed an engine, and started a fire. Things in the cockpit quickly got out of hand at that stage, the two novice pilots having no idea how to manage the flood of alarms that were by now flashing and blaring. It brought home very effectively the attention to detail that has to go into the design of a system like this one in order to create a realistic platform for pilot training and instruction – great to see it all happening right here in SA.
I hope you find this issue interesting.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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