Site visit
The branch arranged a visit to uShaka Marine World on 16 August. The group was kindly hosted by Daryl Waugh, senior technician operations, who provided an underground tour and comprehensive technical explanation of all the systems that provide life support to this world-class aquarium.
Some interesting facts include:
• The aquarium uses 5,2 MW of electricity and Darryl has many sustainability initiatives under way to reduce their energy footprint.
• There are 32 km of piping connecting the tanks and support systems.
• The control system uses a PLC/scada with 15 distributed CPUs and around 600 I/O interconnected by an Ethernet network.
• Sand filters are used for bulk purification and backwashed on a weekly basis using fully automated control logic.
• The water is continuously cleaned using ozone as a disinfectant and coagulant. The ozone is generated on site and is dosed in conjunction with Ozonia flotation/skimmer units to remove unwanted solids. Ozone is extremely harmful to marine life (sharks are the most sensitive!) so redox activity is continuously measured and controlled between 200 and 600 mV potential. The control system has an SMS gateway to alert operations staff for any limits that are exceeded by this critical parameter.
Many thanks to uShaka Marine World for an excellent and interesting tour!
Technology evening
Kenneth McPherson, managing director of Beckhoff Automation presented to the SAIMC Durban branch at its September Technology meeting on the subject of “Smart manufacturing needs smart bus technologies”. Kenneth has presented to the Durban branch on two previous occasions the topics of Ethercat and Industrie 4.0. His presentation revisited the core features of Ethercat and the concept of industrial PC based control as the base constituents of the smart factory, made
possible by the extremely high performance of both the controller CPUs and the Ethercat network which offers deterministic service to bus connected devices at microsecond level. He spoke of the advantages of Ethercat as a logical bus technology that can be implemented on whichever physical topology the customer desires, using only MAC device addressing to connect over 65 000 nodes on a single network segment without the use of any Ethernet hubs or switches. Extensibility to more devices can be supported by simply creating another network segment from the controller. This simplicity is a key factor in reducing system costs, commissioning time and improving robustness.
He introduced their latest Safety over Ethercat offering with new ELX series terminals for compliance with Ex Zone 0, and Ethercat P which provides power over Ethercat using standard CAT 6 cable, albeit with a special plug family to eliminate the possibility of incorrect connections.
He highlighted Beckhoff’s drive to open standards through the Ethercat Technology Group (ETG), which is now the largest and most widely supported bus technology group in the world. Through the efforts of ETG, Ethercat has now been included in various IEEE fieldbus standards including 61158, 61784 and 61800.
He also revisited their drive into Industrie 4.0 and spoke of their support for MQTT, AMQP and more importantly OPC UA for connectivity to the cloud and subscription based services such as off-site data archiving and machine learning from Microsoft, IBM and Google. Beckhoff is a member of the OPC Foundation and one of their executive currently chairs the UA group.
Beckhoff has been showing 15% or higher compound annual revenue growth for many years now so watch out for Kenneth in your area – his is a company that is sure to attract your attention in the near future!
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