Case Studies
Please feel free to download this all as a PDF - Case studies
Boat monitoring
Some of the Pilot Boats used by a well-known port in Ireland are due for replacement. The new boats have many sensors installed to monitor the engine performance parameters such as oil pressure, engine temperature etc. The new boats also have impact sensors and swipe card reader that can be used for ignition control installed to
counter unreported damages suffered by the boats - one of the main operational problems experienced by the Port Authority.
Etanian was asked to install a telemetry system that will provide a link to the card
reader and create a local database for the authorised pilots so that it will not only
check the Pilots’ ID cards validity but also log the name and time of the pilot who
drove the boat. The system also logs the various engine parameters by
communicating with the CAT engine’s PL1000E engine controller via Modbus
TCP/IP.
The engine data is read by the on-shore zenon SCADA software in real time via an
event-driven wireless GPRS communication link. The update frequency is
determined by the value dead band assigned to each parameter. This unique solution
ensures the operating costs for the mobile data can be kept to the minimum. The
same link is also used to upload the logged data from the onboard telemetry controller
so that it can be archived.
The Port Authority can now reliably monitor the engine performance remotely as well
as encouraging the pilots to steer the boat more carefully.
Water and Compressed Air Usage Monitoring and Reporting
A Dairy Products manufacturer in County Kerry needed to log the daily water usage
to reduce their operating costs. The water meters are distributed around the site in
different buildings and some of these meters are not readily accessible. As a result,
Kerry Ingredients wished to automate the whole process so that they can access the
daily water usage meter data on a PC without leaving their office.
Etanian was subcontracted to design a remote data collection system that produces
daily reports automatically. The final system utilised off-the-shelf low power radios
and Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) that can count and log the water meter pulse
outputs, and zenon PC SCADA software that can read and archive the logged data
from the RTUs and produce daily water usage reports automatically from the archive.
The customer is so happy that he has added the logging and reporting of compressed
air usage to the system as a result of the significant savings that he has managed to
achieve from reduced water usage..
Temperature and energy monitoring
For any food production company, the quality of their food products is of paramount
importance. This means the whole production process has to be monitored critically
to ensure the products are prepared, cooked, chilled and packed at the right
temperature.
The existing production monitoring system installed in this producer of poultry
products needs to be upgraded, as the software only runs on a 16-bit Windows
operating system. Etanian was invited to bring the system up-to-date with new
SCADA software that is compatible with the installed hardware and provide display
screens that is as close to the existing user interface as far as possible.
The customer can now view the temperatures at each stage of the production process
in real time or historically via trend graphs and view the daily reports, produced
automatically by the new software, of the temperatures and electricity consumption
logged and archived by the system updated every 15 minutes – something that they
could only able to get once every day before the upgrade.
zenon Consultancy
Imperial Tobacco standardise on zenon as their SCADA software of choice. One of
their System Integrators requires consultancy in one of their projects to download
recipes stored in a SQL database into the production machines via zenon.
Etanian was able to advise the System Integrator on site how the task could be
achieved by creating subprojects in zenon and use the Report Generator to read the
recipes from the SQL database and then write the recipes into the production
machines.
This approach ensures the most up-to-date and identical recipes, maintained in the
SQL database, are downloaded to the production machines so that the quality is
assured.
Reservoir Level and Flow Rate Monitoring
The supply of water in Ireland is managed by the Local Councils.
One of the County Councils has installed a new telemetry system to monitor and log
the reservoir levels, flow rates and electricity usage. However, the new system is
based on dial-up modems, so the flow rates are calculated after the logged data has
been uploaded into the system for trend displays. This means if the logged data is
uploaded only once a day, the trend displays could take an hour to be refreshed. The
Council has also found the trend display was somewhat limited in terms of
functionality.
Etanian was approached to provide an alternative solution to improve the user
interface and the system performance.
By using zenon SCADA software as the solution, the trend graph being displayed is
refreshed as soon as the logged data is uploaded. This is because zenon only need to
compute what is being displayed in real time, ie not on all the data being collected.
zenon also enhanced the trend display options by providing buttons for zooming,
time and date filter (to locate the data from the archive), add/remove trend streams in
Run Time among other functions.
Please feel free to download this all as a PDF - Case studies
