Control System World

Foster Wheeler AG (Nasdaq: FWLT) announced today that a subsidiary of its Global Engineering and Construction Group has been awarded an engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCm) contract by LANXESS Changzhou Co., Ltd for a new ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM) rubber plant to be built at the Changzhou Yangtze Riverside Industrial Park at Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, in the People’s Republic of China. Foster Wheeler is currently executing the front-end engineering design (FEED) for this facility.

The Foster Wheeler contract value for this project was not disclosed and was included in the company’s third-quarter 2012 bookings. The new facility will be designed to produce 160,000 tonnes per annum of EPDM rubber. The plant is expected to start up in 2015. LANXESS, a leading specialty chemicals company headquartered in Germany, states that this new plant, which it describes as the largest EPDM rubber facility in the world, is its largest investment in China to date.

EPDM is used primarily in the automotive industry as door sealants or windscreen wipers. It is also used in the plastics modification, cable and wire, construction and oil additives industries.

“This latest win further demonstrates the value LANXESS places on the quality of our people and its confidence in our performance in delivering LANXESS’ projects safely and successfully,” said Umberto della Sala, Chief Operating Officer, Foster Wheeler AG. “Foster Wheeler is working as the EPCm contractor on three of LANXESS’ major projects in Asia.”

Rockwell Automation has announced the addition of EtherNet/IP to its medium-voltage Allen-Bradley CENTERLINE motor control centers (MCCs). With the features of an integrated EtherNet/IP network, manufacturers now have access to production information throughout the enterprise and can take advantage of simplified device programming with Premier Integration.

“We are excited to extend our portfolio of EtherNet/IP-enabled MCCs to include medium voltage,” said Jeff Nolan, product manager, Medium Voltage MCCs, Rockwell Automation. “As with our low-voltage MCCs, EtherNet/IP integration allows customers the ability to access more detailed production data, allowing plant engineers to predict potential problems and help prevent equipment failures. This ultimately results in higher asset availability and reduced maintenance costs.”

Leveraging a single, standard network simplifies communication for the entire enterprise and provides users with the flexibility to control, configure and collect data from any point in the system. In addition, by taking advantage of Premier Integration, users can configure and commission their MCC faster with Rockwell Software Studio 5000 engineering and design environment, helping to eliminate errors associated with redundant programming.

Furthermore, the Ethernet connection allows CENTERLINE MCC users to access information remotely. This lets personnel safely monitor, troubleshoot and diagnose the MCC without exposing them to potentially dangerous conditions and power equipment. Knowing how an MCC is performing from anywhere also saves time by minimizing the need for maintenance personnel to enter the MCC. This involves suiting up with personal protective equipment to help protect personnel from exposure to hazardous conditions.

With embedded Allen-Bradley IntelliCENTER technology, Centerline MCCs use a pre-configured and pretested network with integrated hardware and software. This level of integration helps reduce installation time with its plug-and-play setup, and can help minimize facility downtime by quickly providing intelligent diagnostic and predictive failure information.

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25th International exhibition for environmental equipment, technologies and services on 27th - 30th November 2012 - LYON Eurexpo - France.

As the world’s leading show for the Environment sector, Pollutec brings together over 4 days in Lyon the full range of equipments, technologies and services for the prevention and treatment of pollution of all kinds, and more generally for the preservation of the environment and the implementation of sustainable development.

Pollutec, the international exhibition of environment equipment, technology and services, is once again offering 2,318 eco-enterprises from all around the world outstanding presentation and development options. It features a broad array of innovative eco-solutions in all of its sectors – water, air, waste and recycling, energy, sites & soils, risks, analysis / measurement / monitoring – that will allow the twofold challenge facing any business today, namely reducing its environmental footprint whilst at the same time maintaining its economic performance, to be met. Pollutec has moved beyond its traditional market in the field of pollution prevention and treatment to cover the full range of eco-industries and cleantechs in general.

Major Manufacturers, Technology providers, Engineering companies, Govt sectors and representative of various Industries will be participating.

Click For details on this Exhibition & Conference

CLick to read the Press Release by the organizers.

KBR (NYSE:KBR) has announced that it was awarded a contract to execute project management and field construction for a large boiler project in Georgia.

KBR’s Specialty Field Services group (Boiler Group) will inspect and repair the recovery boiler and perform tube and economizer replacement. KBR will also execute capital expansion. The work will increase efficiency and production at the facility. Services will begin in Spring 2013.

“KBR’s Specialty Field Services has extensive experience serving the pulp and paper industry,” said Ivor Harrington, Group President, Services. “We are pleased to have been selected by this valued client and look forward to building on our long-standing relationship as we work toward the successful completion of this project.”

Siemens Division Industry Automation and Bentley Systems today announced a strategic collaboration to advance the integration of digital product design and manufacturing processes design with information modeling for facilities lifecycle design. According to the Memorandum of Understanding the collaboration will enable the two companies to deliver intelligent and sustainable digital factory infrastructure. Initially the companies will focus on the digital factory for automotive and discrete manufacturing.

The Siemens Division Industry Automation and Bentley Systems will initially, based on their longstanding commitment to openness in information technology, collaborate on common file formats and content, integrated workflows for factory layout, and the convergence of process and layout. This work is an extension of earlier collaborations between the two organizations that resulted in each deploying technology offerings developed by the other. In the longer term, the companies will explore opportunities for jointly developed technology to expand industry-centric solutions and further collaboration interoperability between Siemens' Teamcenter and Bentley's ProjectWise software.

Teamcenter product lifecycle management software helps companies deliver increasingly complex products while maximizing productivity and streamlining global operations. It provides the right information for people to make the right product decisions – from planning and development through manufacturing and support. The ProjectWise system of collaboration servers and services empowers work sharing, facilitating the use of virtual talent, dynamic review for improved project quality, and content reuse for extended value.

Siemens Industry Automation Division CEO Anton S. Huber said, "Together we will drive the paradigm shift that will establish unified and fully collaborative product and production lifecycles for our customers. This will facilitate workflow efficiencies moving our users to the next level of productivity. Today, it is more important than ever to make full use of all optimization opportunities over the entire lifecycle of a machine or plant. This starts with planning and engineering, and continues into operation and maintenance right through to expansion and modernization. Now, as we seek to extend this to include facilities lifecycles, we have determined that Bentley Systems is the right partner to help us bring this new value proposition to realization."

C-more industrial touch screens are designed to give you the best cost of ownership, considering initial price, features, ease of use, reliability and free award-winning technical support. We continue to improve both hardware and software features. Perhaps this is why more and more people find that C-more touch panels have what it takes to meet most of their HMI application needs.

With the C-more series, featuring STN and TFT touch screens, AutomationDirect now provides the best combination of reliability, ease of use, and features at the lowest possible prices. The C-more line of operator interface HMI touch panels is one of the most powerful and easy to use in the industry. With C-more flat panel touch screens, you can virtually replace almost all mechanical pushbuttons, switches, meters, and other peripheral devices.

C-more is programmed with easy-to-use configuration software that provides a powerful set of tools for developing simple or very complex applications. The C-more software makes touchscreen panel setup and C-more programming quick and simple, and all C-more touch panels use the same programming package.

C-more touch panels include many important new features engineered into the product design to provide outstanding hardware and software.

• Analog touch sensing to eliminate touch cell boundaries
• More memory and methods to get data in/out of the panel
• Overlapping active devices on the touch screen
• 65,368 colors for enhanced pictures on 6, 8, 10, 12 and 15" TFT panels (15 shades of gray on 6” STN touch screen panels)
• Higher screen resolutions, 12" and 15" panels
• Built-in project simulation, test on PC while developing
• Serial RS232, RS422/485 and Ethernet 10/100BaseT communications
• Programming via USB or Ethernet
• Optional AC power adapter
• Bright backlight bulbs
• 50,000 hour backlight life on all displays
• User replaceable bulbs on 8, 10, 12 & 15" panels
• Animation of bitmaps
• 4,000 built-in symbols and 10 typefaces with hundreds of font sizes
• PID faceplate, trending, alarming and recipe abilities
• Background screen option for each created screen
• Data logging
• Built-in FTP server, e-mail client, Web server
• Event Manager to trigger actions based on assigned state changes, schedules, PLC tag names or other events set up in a database environment. The event can also trigger a sound bite, initiate a screen capture, send a data file (FTP), send an e-mail, and more.
• Audio output port

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Yokogawa Australia has won a supply bid from Bechtel for integrated control and safety systems for the Chevron-operated Wheatstone Project west of Onslow, Western Australia. The contract, which is worth approximately AUD $20 million, will see the majority of the manufacturing work completed at Yokogawa facilities in Australia.

Yokogawa will be supplying the CENTUM® VP integrated production control system, the ProSafe®-RS safety instrumented system, and the Plant Resource Manager (PRM) plant asset management system for two LNG trains that will have a combined capacity of 8.9 million tons per annum.

This supply win follows Yokogawa's involvement in the upstream portion of the Wheatstone Project, where Yokogawa was awarded the supply of control systems for the control and safety systems for the subsea controllers and the topside offshore infrastructure.

Yokogawa Australia's Managing Director, John Hewitt, comments as follows on how the latest Bechtel supply win underscores the recognized competence and experience of Yokogawa Australia in major LNG projects:

"Yokogawa Australia has a dedicated team of highly skilled process and IT engineers and support staff (57 of whom are based in Perth) providing the enabling technology to a number of key projects in Western Australia, notably in the oil and gas and minerals processing industries. Yokogawa opened a new Perth office in 2010 after 21 years in WA, and is currently doubling its office space to support these projects and provide training in our systems. Yokogawa Australia is developing into a center of excellence for LNG projects as measured by total gas train capacity which will be controlled by Yokogawa's VigilantPlant system".

National Instruments today announced that the NI Instrument Driver Network (IDNet) has reached a new milestone of 10,000 instrument drivers for automating stand-alone instrumentation. From IDNet, you can access free, NI-certified instrument driver downloads for NI LabVIEW system design software, NI LabWindows™/CVI and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. IDNet instrument drivers simplify instrument control across a variety of buses including GPIB, USB, PXI, PCI, Ethernet, LXI and RS232.

NI also released a free tool for creating LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers called LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio, so engineers can easily develop their own drivers and upload them to IDNet. LabVIEW Instrument Driver Development Studio provides a powerful and flexible platform that speeds up development through functional SCPI command templates for common instrument types and automatically generates LabVIEW source code for the instrument. Engineers can easily develop consistent instrument drivers by loading and modifying the source code from an existing driver and create sophisticated driver architectures with the drag-and-drop interactive user interface. NI can then certify the instrument driver to verify that it meets established standards.

Quotes

“We typically check the NI Instrument Network for instrument driver availability prior to selecting equipment for purchase because we are well aware of the amount of development time lost when creating drivers ourselves,” said Ernest Clifford, senior systems engineer at Alpha Research and Technology. “If the equipment manufacturer has a LabVIEW driver available, we’ll always select that device over one that does not have a LabVIEW instrument driver.”