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China's Yellow River project
South Africa Instrumentation & Control, July 2008
Control of the river is via a Wonderware Industrial Application Server, InTouch human machine interface (HMI) software and SuiteVoyager portal software
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Better hardware, better bottle
Control Engineering Europe, June 2008
Amcor, an Australian packaging company, installed Wonderware InTouch SCADA and real-time database InSQL on Advantech Touch Screen PCs. The acquisition of data from plastics machinery required fast data access without affecting PLC cycle time. A pilot design was developed and tested prior to deployment across 28 machines.
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Royal Huisman gives yacht SCADA boost
Control Engineering Europe, June 2008
Royal Huisam, a boat building company in the Netherlands, used a SCADA system to boost energy efficiency on its 58m ‘Ethereal’ yacht. The system includes CitectSCADA V7 with integrated clustering, 26 PLCs, 2 servers and 30 display clients.
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Keeping Robots In-Line – Someone Has To Do It
By Advantech
Robots only do what they are told to do. What happens when they forget or get out of line? Here, a PC monitors ABB robots to ensure integrity and accuracy of the procedures input into robot diagnostics.
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A Machine Renaissance
Control Design, March 2008
By Joe Morrissey, Conflex
Conflex, a builder of shrink-wrapping machines, substantially redesigned each machine in its product line and converted to Beckhoff’s DIN-rail-mounted embedded PC and IEC 61131-3-compliant automation and motion control software.
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Managing MS Windows NT4
Control Engineering, January 2008
By Bob Vieraitis, Solidcore Systems
One class of systems where any change, authorized or not, creates a high-risk proposition is legacy systems running the Microsoft Windows NT4 operating system. Changes can cause in-production outages and downtime that threatens overall plant production. Here’s how one plant solved the problem.
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Inspection Capabilities are Looking Up
Automation World, December 2007
By Terry Costlow
The Kendall-Jackson winery packages more than 3 million cases of wine each year, so it’s a big challenge to position labels on bottles.. Kendall-Jackson handled its labeling problem with PC-based control and the CIVision 360 Full View inspection system. Four cameras simultaneously examine a bottle as it leaves the labeling space.
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True PC-Based Control
American Machinist, October 2007
Fluid Line Products in Willoughby, Ohio, replaced some outdated equipment with true PC-based controls: the P100 THINC-OSP Microsoft Windows and PC-based control from Okuma America Corp.
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Wireless PCs streamline warehouse operations
Plant Services, August 2007
Empower operators by installing an onboard computer on each forklift, making the location of items and empty storage space immediately visible. At City Furniture, Tamarac, Fla., all 35 forklifts are equipped with GX-1200 fixed-mount rugged computers from Glacier Computer.
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Hydraulic Motion Control
Control Engineering, April 2007
By Rick Meyerhoefer, Delta Computer Systems
Adding PC-based controls improved performance and simplified operation for a powder compacting press machine. The “smart” machine they developed used a multi-axis electro-hydraulic motion controller and PC working together to replace the PLC-based control systems of the past.
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PC-controlled Test Platforms Add Flexibility & Reduce Costs
Most test devices now have some form of PC interface so acquired data can be uploaded to a computer where it is re-formatted, stored, integrated and distributed. The test device may be where the data is acquired - but the PC is where the data is ultimately used. Consequently a trend towards PC-controlled test equipment is emerging. The PC-controlled format can eliminate data transfer and formatting problems, reduce overall system cost and improve test efficiency and flexibility.
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PC & Embedded Control Trends
by Bjoern Falke of Phoenix Contact
The trend to reduce machine size and cost while increasing productivity requires new approaches to control systems. Thanks to the increased reliability of Industrial PC technology, traditional rack-based PLCs can be replaced with more powerful PC-based control systems. While Industrial PC’s provide the highest performance and control capacity, new generations of PC technology based on open embedded operating systems, combine the functions of a PLC and an operator panel in one unit which is applicable to smaller scale applications.
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Don’t Get Run Over: The Evolution of PC Bus Technologies
by Bjoern Falke of Phoenix Contact.
Over the last decade, there’s been an increasing trend toward the use of PC-based automation solutions. In the early 1990s large automakers and other manufacturers began using standard PCs for machine control. These systems often replaced the compact, microprocessor-based solutions – programmable logic controls or PLCs – that were found in most plants at the time. Since then, PCs running Microsoft Windows and other operating systems have worked their way into a wide variety of industrial applications, experiencing growth that outstrips competing solutions.
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How do Thin Clients run Windows software without a PC?
Discusses the use of Terminal Server and Thin Client Technology in industrial HMI and SCADA applications.
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Insider Tips on Buying a SCADA System
by Frank Kling, Control Systems International, Inc.
One of the most important and difficult decisions is often the very first decision: do you upgrade with internal resources or hire an outside consultant? Some of the arguments for each side in this debate are obvious. You know what you want better than anyone, but a consultant may have more experience in the actual process of acquiring a SCADA system. There’s a lot to be said in favor of both approaches. Neither is an inherently good or bad approach.
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Web-based HMI: An emerging trend?
by Steven A. Hechtman of Calmetrics Company
Once considered impractical for applications requiring responsive animation and real-time control, a new breed of web-based HMI system is starting to appear on plant floors and in manufacturing enterprises. Unlike traditional systems, these web-based systems can economically be extended to every aspect of a business such as QC, maintenance, logistics, plant manager, and so forth. Now every participant in the manufacturing cycle can have unprecedented access to vital plant production information.
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Water SCADA - San Luis Obispo
In the good old days, industrial process control was pretty easy. It was all done by hand. If you wanted to fill a tank with water, you turned on a pump. When the tank got full, you shut it off. With a telescope, you could even do this at a fair distance, assuming it wasn't dark and you could see the indicator on the tank.
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Ease of connection improves plant efficiency for Santee Cooper
OPC technology provides ease of access to the wide variety of devices in our enterprise, eliminating costly custom or proprietary interfaces. Providing us with a flexible and scalable solution we can build on for years to come. We are confident and secure in our ability to meet the 98% uptime emissions reporting requirements. Now that these manual processes are automated, we are saving approximately 4 hours of resource allocation in a 24 hour shift rotation
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OEM Uses High-Speed Industrial Network for Stand-Alone Machinery
Has new Windows NT-based industrial PCs and industrial networks finally shelved standard PLC control for good? At least one forward-thinking Midwestern OEM thinks so.
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All Wound Up - IRA Griffins Sizing Machine uses New Automation Technology
In the making of textiles, fiber material is turned into yarn that is then weaved into cloth. IRA Griffin Sons, Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina, makes sizing machines that combine fiber ends and apply a chemical to protect the fiber and yard from stress damage during the weaving process. The company recently reengineered their machines to reduce costs, increase reliability and simplify the control systems
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How do we keep our Control Systems ahead of competition and provide enough flexibility with all the latest technology trends?
Traditional control systems used by competition are either proprietary embedded controllers or a “closed” HMI married with a PLC. Most HMI products force integrators to use their HMI software, thus limiting their capability. Enhancements and updates are usually slow to come, making it difficult to keep up with technology. On the control side, PLC’s have evolved very little over the years. Support for scripting and larger function libraries help, but developing advanced & adaptive control algorithms are difficult to impossible on most PLC platforms.
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Metal Injection Molding Process – Eliminating Metal Particles to Speed-Up Production and Delivery
Metal injection molding is a relatively new process in part forming technology where several key technologies in material science, injection molding, and heated ovens all work together in the same location to produce molded metal parts of various metal properties. Finished parts are sintered to near full density; do not require machining, and meet surface finish and dimensional accuracy requirements not easily obtained with other part forming technologies.
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Beckhoff Pass Saw Test at Koch
As a manufacturer of woodworking machines based in the German town of Leopoldshöhe, Koch Maschinenbau don‘t have a minute to spare if 1800 wooden drawers are to be made every hour. The changeover from classical PLCs to PC technology was just as brisk. The company are now fitting Beckhoff automation equipment to its machines.
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Airport Terminal Operations
FMC Technologies Airport Services oversees Continental Airlines maintenance at the George Bush International Airport in Houston, TX. Three areas of the facility that FMC manages have begun to age and needs replacement parts but, after looking into these parts, they were either too expensive or obsolete. “The failure of the communication ports are preventing critical information being passed to the PLC”, says Larry Buford, Senior Systems Analyst at FMC. The goal was to find a field solution allowing FMC to replace the outdated equipment running Windows NT and migrate to Windows XP and interface with Object Automation (OA) Software.
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Real-time Linux, past and present
Embedded Computing Design, March 2007
By Daniel Walker, MontaVista Software
Linux traditionally has been considered a general-purpose server or desktop Operating System (OS), and as a result is often viewed as incapable of true real-time functionality. However, this assumption has proven false on multiple occasions. In fact, various Linux approaches begin with a dual OS, Linux, and Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) and continue down the path of low latency, resulting in Linux as the RTOS. Typical real-time approaches entail running an application on bare hardware or using a small OS, which is considered tightly bounded and specifically created for use in real-time applications
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Rugged Oil and Gas Well Logging Data Acquisition System
By: Corin Chepko, Rocky Mountain Wireline Service
Rocky Mountain Wireline Service is an oil and gas perforating and logging company. The data acquisition system we use is rack-mounted in a wireline truck and must withstand vibration and dust generated as the truck moves to different locations over rough roads. These conditions cause problems with industrial PCs. We needed a system that was reliable and easy to repair or replace in the case of failure.
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