Control System World

Rockwell Automation has announced that it has agreed to purchase MagneMotion, a leading manufacturer of intelligent conveying systems. MagneMotion systems are used across a broad range of industrial applications including automotive and general assembly, packaging and material handling. This acquisition will complement Rockwell Automation’s iTRAK to create the broadest portfolio of independent cart solutions in this emerging technology area.

“This acquisition continues our strategy to build a portfolio of smart manufacturing technologies that brings next generation performance to our customers today,” said Marco Wishart, vice president and general manager of Rockwell Automation’s motion control business. “MagneMotion expands our existing capabilities in independent cart technology. Our recent acquisition of Jacobs Automation and its iTRAK technology is complementary to MagneMotion’s portfolio. We see a future where the transportation of products within the factory, whether inside of a particular machine or between machines, will be fully controlled to optimize the productivity and flexibility of the entire process.”

“This deal is the logical next step in the evolution of our business, and a welcome development for MagneMotion,” said Todd Weber, president and CEO of MagneMotion. “Rockwell Automation’s leading position in plant-wide controls and industrial automation gives us the best opportunity to introduce this technology to customers. As the market continues to realize the benefits of applying independent cart technology, Rockwell Automation’s global organization will be a tremendous asset.”

MagneMotion, based in Devens, Mass., will be integrated into Rockwell Automation’s motion business, within its Architecture & Software segment. The acquisition is expected to close this quarter.

Honeywell has launched a new app providing plant managers immediate notifications as well as real-time plant performance data and analytics direct to their smartphones.

Honeywell Pulse™, part of Honeywell’s Industrial Internet of Things network, is the company’s newest technology enabling plant managers, supervisors and others to stay connected to their enterprise – wherever they are in the world. The app brings relevant metrics and the tools to resolve issues directly to mobile devices, helping to improve efficiency and safety.

“Honeywell’s IIoT is all about data, data analytics, and especially big data analytics,” said Bruce Calder, vice president and chief technology officer for Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS). “The IIoT, cloud and mobility have really supercharged our portfolio. Honeywell Pulse gives managers and supervisors peace of mind by allowing them to receive alerts and monitor performance remotely. This allows plant personnel to respond faster to situations, whether they are planned or unplanned.”

Honeywell is well positioned to leverage the IIoT, a network of networks that uses the Internet to connect people, processes and assets, and to enable a new way to optimize business results and improve safety through increased mobility.

Honeywell recently conducted a customer mobility strategy survey which showed 65 percent of customers in the chemicals, refining, pulp and paper, and upstream oil and gas industries have a mobility strategy. It identified the top three operational areas that generate the most interest in mobility are processing facilities, field service and logistics. The survey also revealed that customers are investing in mobility in three key areas: information visibility, improved field service workflow and safety compliance.

HMS Industrial Networks now introduces a new family of Industrial IoT gateways for Smart Grid applications. The Anybus SG-gateways enable communication between industrial applications and energy protocols.

This communication is the very basis for the so called “Smart Grid” where power plants and energy equipment are interacting with industrial applications. The SG-gateways are yet another example of how HMS realizes the Industrial Internet of Things.
Anybus SG-gateways make the Smart Grid possible
The new SG-gateways enable communication between industrial devices running Modbus, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, or M-Bus and energy protocols (IEC61850 and IEC60870-5-104).

This means that a power plant control room which is using the IEC protocols, can connect to industrial devices such as generators, drives, filters and protection equipment.

Since the SG-gateways can act both as a master and slave, it is also possible to connect Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) which communicate over IEC-standards, to industrial networks, allowing them to be controlled by PLCs from e.g. Siemens, Rockwell or Mitsubishi.

Product Website

Moxa’s newly launched ThingsPro Suite is an integrated solution for distributed data acquisition and device management that can immensely simplify your Industrial IoT deployments. Built on an open Debian Linux platform, the ThingsPro Suite enables the integration of Modbus communications and device management, data acquisition and processing, and wireless networking, in a few simple steps.

Moxa, with its experience in Industrial IoT project installations over the past few years, is aware of the challenges companies have been facing while deploying Industrial IoT solutions. According to Ryan Teng, product manager, Moxa’s Embedded Computing Division, “For an Industrial IoT application, the value is in the data. Before the data can be used however, it must be gathered from thousands of devices. This is often a drain on engineering resources. ThingsPro Suite aims to provide a simple, integrated data-acquisition and device-management solution to speed up the development of these devices, thus shorten the time-to-market.”

Featuring the Data Logger and Wireless Manager utilities, ThingsPro Suite empowers users to focus primarily on their applications instead of the complex process of integrating the field devices with the applications in the centralized control facility. ThingsPro Suite is currently available with Moxa UC-8100-CG series computers.

ThingsPro Suite Highlights:

• Ready-to-Run Data Acquisition Engine with Data-Logger Utility
• Data polling engine for Modbus/RTU and Modbus/TCP
• Modbus API to interface with user applications, providing greater programming flexibility
• Data logging software that can interface with remote databases, easing data acquisition

Read More

Oman Liquefied Natural Gas LLC (OLNG) is a limited liability joint venture established by a royal decree and operated under the laws of the Sultanate of Oman. It produces and sells liquefied natural gas (LNG) and byproduct natural gas liquids (NGLs).

The company undertakes, directly or indirectly, project operations and activities necessary to liquefy, store, transport, and market Oman’s natural gas, and delivers LNG to customers worldwide. The company operates three liquefaction trains at Qalhat near Sur that have a combined capacity of 10.55 million tons per annum.

In 2013, Yokogawa received an order to supply an operator training system (OTS) for the OLNG natural gas liquefaction trains at the Qalhat site. OLNG directly awarded this OTS order to Yokogawa Middle East & Africa in recognition of the long-term relationship between the companies and Yokogawa’s strong commitment to its projects. This OTS was successfully installed and commissioned in November 2014. The OTS is comprised of an OmegaLand simulation engine and an automation system made up of a CENTUM VP integrated production control system.

Download Full Story

The implementation of an automatic dosing of the flocculants allows the customer to respect (24h a day, 365 days a year) the limit for phosphate in the outlet and save a lot of money: resulting in less chemicals and sludge production.

The results

• Saving of 26.000 €/year of flocculants (PAC)
• 2% reduction of sludge production
• Even with a big peak of phosphate in the inlet, the outlet was under the official limit each time

Customer challenge:

The inlet of this wastewater treatment plant is variable due to industrial high load wastewater. The manual dosing of flocculants was not enough to maintain the concentration of phosphate in the outlet under the official limit of 1 mg/l P total. The customer challenge is to respect the official outlet limit of Phosphate and manage the chemicals’ costs efficiently.

Download Success Story

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces the establishment of Industrial Knowledge, a new business unit that will play a key role in accelerating expansion of Yokogawa's business in asset intensive industries through the provision of cloud-based advanced solutions. Expansion of the advanced solution business, whose goal is to maximize performance for our customers through the attainment of operational excellence, is one of the important strategies set out in Yokogawa's Transformation 2017 mid-term business plan.
As called for under the Transformation 2017 plan announced in May of last year, Yokogawa is striving to expand its solutions service business by engaging its customers in a co-innovation process that will add value by achieving a company-wide optimization of their business operations. Advanced solutions are a core element of the company's solutions service business, and include packaged software solutions that improve productivity, safety, and energy efficiency and optimize the utilization of facilities.

Industrial Knowledge is the DBA*1 name of Yokogawa Venture Group, Inc., a wholly owned Yokogawa subsidiary that was established in December 2015 to engage in the provision of SaaS,*2 a cloud-based advanced solution business. Industrial Knowledge will play a central role in devising strategy and developing this business while seeking to extend the range of its solutions and technologies through the adoption of existing Yokogawa technologies and the use of M&A. Industrial Knowledge has experts in advanced solutions and M&A, and will be granted unprecedented leeway to undertake initiatives to develop this business. This is a key merit of the establishment of a business operation that is independent from Yokogawa's existing businesses.

To serve as a platform for the development of its cloud-based advanced solution business, in December 2015 Yokogawa acquired Industrial Evolution, Inc., a company with a strong track record in the provision of cloud-based site-connected data sharing services (DaaS*3) that foster multi-enterprise collaboration.

Industrial Knowledge will focus on solutions that create value for industrial customers by collecting, integrating, and analyzing data and converting it into an actionable form.

Industrial Knowledge will rely on Industrial Evolution's secure cloud platform and technologies for the collection, integration, and analysis of real-time process data from firewall protected systems to quickly develop its business. Already in use by our customers to collect data from thousands of systems and devices and deliver services over the cloud, this platform is IIoT-ready. A prime example is a major process licensor that gathers data in real time from licensees' plants around the world and provides remote monitoring and support services for plant operations, including start-up assistance, warranty obligation fulfillment, and plant performance guidance. Furthermore, this business unit will capitalize on the high reliability and quality of Yokogawa's measurement and control technologies as well as the proven track record and accumulated expertise of Yokogawa and Industrial Knowledge to co-create solutions that foster multi-enterprise collaboration through the sharing and utilization of data.

IEC-61850 is the specific standard for smart substations and defines the Ethernet protocol to be used for data communication and defines how devices in the substation communicate with each other. IEC-61850-3 devices need to meet electromagnetic Interference (EMI), temperature, and shock/vibration resistance requirements.

The Intel Core Haswell i7 CPU of the ECU-4784 supports Intel functionality. Intel AMT is an independent design of the operating system and enables it to be monitored and managed, regardless of whether it’s switched on or if the operating system has frozen.

To aid system integrators in building their systems, the ECU-4784 features dual expansion slots which can be used to significantly increase the number of COM, LAN, I/O ports.

Included with the ECU-4784 is the following value added functions: iCDManager (intelligent connectivity diagnosis manager), TPM (Trusted Platform Module), AMT (Active Management Technology) and VT-D (Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O).
iCDManager checks the system communication status and can quantitatively measure the status. It helps ECU-4784 series enhance maintenance efficiency and ensure system operated smoothly.

TPM is an integrated motherboard chip and provides basic security-related functions, primarily involving encryption keys. Its purpose is to check the system integrity and authenticate third-party users who would like to access the security features. Therefore, the privacy and confidentiality of the ECU-4784 series are assured.

The Intel CPU of ECU-4784 supports Intel VT-D functionality by using the VT-D hardware assistance built into Intel’s chipsets. The VT-D provides the necessary isolation to assure separation between each virtual machine’s computer resources.