Adroit Technologies, a Proudly South African company has always kept its scada product up to date, with its name frequently appearing alongside other international big names in scada, both in South Africa and countries abroad.
Building management and maintenance on the cutting edge
Autoliv, manufacturers of safety belts and airbags, are required to adhere to stringent local and international safety standards. The law requires that the process manufacturing data of safety critical equipment be retained by the company for a period of 10-15 years. Autoliv looked to Adroit Technologies, developers of advanced scada systems, to assist them in setting up a scada HMI with the prerequisite historical and trending data functionality that comes standard with the Adroit package.
Bar coding is used to track the assembly of each component in the safety equipment manufacturing process, from screws whose torque and torque angle must be recorded to the inflator which houses the explosive compound used to detonate the airbag, and the second system that locks the safety belt when a car starts rolling. The Adroit built-in event viewer is simple to configure applying filtering criteria to the information content and the visual format, making it easy for Autoliv to record each component, track it through the manufacturing process and store the information in an easily traceable format in the event of an inquiry into equipment failure.
Assisted by Bob Bell of Adroit, Autoliv's process engineer, Johan Baard set about installing the Adroit scada HMI to monitor two Festo PLCs that control the side impact and passenger airbag manufacturing equipment, and a second Adroit system to monitor the four Festo PLCs that control the safety equipment manufacturing for Volkswagen, which is undertaken at the Autoliv plant. The Adroit system replaced existing scada that Autoliv had found too costly to maintain. Baard comments, "Autoliv selected the Adroit scada for its cost effectiveness and ease of use."
Using the standard graphic tools supplied with the Adroit system, Baard was able to design all of his own mimic screens easily and allowing him to keep up with the dynamic visualisation needs of the plant.
Airbag manufacturing takes place in an antistatic environment, which meant that Adroit needed to set up a standalone system for that segment of the plant. These two PLCs are networked together via an Ethernet, but not connected to the plants main network. The four PLCs at the Volkswagen plant are also linked together on a separated Profibus network.
Information is collected by the Adroit system and stored in a Microsoft Access database, form where it can be retrieved and manipulated by the operators to draw reports on process components such as cycle times and rejects.
Bell wrote the drivers that collect data from the plants 8 serial scanners and connect it to a single PC. All store components are drawn manually, and with the integration of the Autoliv's fourth shift manufacturing execution system; Adroit will provide hourly updates of the stock on the floor.
As a subsidiary of its German-based parent company, Autoliv's future expansion plans include linking the scada to the Internet for the purposes of information sharing.
Cost effective safety critical application
Today's building maintenance is seeing a continued rise in technological innovation. The systems required at present must meet a whole new level of automation, such as the need to interface with a variety of equipment and a multitude of other tools. As the scale and complexity of buildings grows, so supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) systems are becoming central to the efficiency, monitoring and control of building management and of ancillary systems such as cooling, ventilation, access control, temperature monitoring, and even the on/off switching of lights.
Adroit Technologies, is a local technology leader in the development of scada systems, and its recent installation at Carnival City, Sun International's flagship casino, enabled the casino's maintenance managers to continuously monitor all critical areas from a central point, including the vast expanse of 1750 slot machines, specialist restaurants, uninterrupted power supplies (UPS), and the parkade. Other less obvious areas that the Adroit scada controls include hot water circulation pumps, escalators, boilers, water feature pumps, cold rooms, fridges, booster pumps, power usage and spikes overview and load control.
By continuously monitoring equipment usage, Carnival City is able to prevent downtime by instigating a programme of preventative maintenance based on actual equipment usage instead of basing its maintenance on estimates and maintenance tables and risking equipment failure - or incurring the cost of unnecessary maintenance. Pumps and boilers can be turned off at times when load sharing needs to be controlled using Adroit's unique control features which also allow Carnival City to turn the smoke detectors off, for example, if they have a show with smoke effects.
A scada is not a full control system, but rather focuses on the supervisory level, where this software package is positioned on top of hardware to which it is connected, in general, via programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or other commercial modules through which the scada enables central monitoring and control of small remote clusters of input/output channels (I/O) via the Ethernet. Adroit's new Version 5, for example, now ships complete with an OPC Server Component to ensure the easy sharing of data with other OPC compliant process applications.
Sasol's Synthetic Fuels (SSF) plant in Secunda; where coal is converted into liquid fuels, pipeline gas and a broad spectrum of chemical feedstocks, lends itself as an example of how a scada system can save lives through the accurate monitoring, alarming and detection of fires and gas leaks across its facilities. The system is networked to Sasol's main control, the engineering office and the fire station to ensure that fault areas are identified accurately and immediately and specialist teams can be deployed to the correct areas without delay. Alarming can be configured to include on-screen warnings, SMS notification to remote building managers, audible alarms and can even be globally acknowledged through the Internet.
The LonWorks fieldbus network has become the standard for the building management industry in the UK and elsewhere. Star Refrigeration, a UK leader in the supply and management of complete systems to cold stores, uses Adroit to monitor data and performance of its clients remote industrial refrigeration plants because Adroit fulfilled their network (the Adroit scada fits very convincingly into LonWorks by creating a high performance LonWorks driver which supports both standard network variable type (SNTVTs) and user definable network variable type (UNVTs)), as well as their data acquisition and monitoring requirements.
Star Refrigeration keeps logged information for its clients and using Adroit's unique plant VCR functionality allows 'video playback' of selected time frames of data that can be viewed graphically in context without needing to analyse large quantities of data. This improves Star's diagnostic capability, saving many hours on site, while also providing an impressive vector graphic visual display of the entire facility. The plant VCR provides almost unlimited opportunities for zooming, panning and resizing display/monitoring/trending of capabilities to its clients who are able to access the information via the Internet.
Scada systems used to run on DOS, VMS and UNIX but in recent years have moved to NT and some also to Linux and have made substantial progress over recent years in terms of functionality, scalability, performance and openness such that some now offer the advantage of in-house development, even for very demanding and complex control systems.
Adroit's latest Version 5, for example, offers Project Explorer, a user interface offering a visual overview of the complete scada configuration. The new tree-type Project Explorer allows for simpler access and configuration of local and remote Adroit servers. By connecting to remote servers, Version 5.0 offers the ability to configure the servers from a single location. It is possible to explore server, mimic and security configuration from Project Explorer.
For more information contact Adroit Technologies, 011 781 3513, general@adroit.co.za, www.adroit.co.za, www.proudlysa.co.za
Tel: | +27 11 658 8100 |
Email: | info@adroit.co.za |
www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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