Control System World

Power management company Eaton has recently announced the release of the Power Xpert® gateway (PXG) 900, an electrical system communications device designed to deliver easy, remote access to power system parameters and alarms through a Web browser. Engineered to enhance energy performance in commercial, institutional and industrial facilities, the compact solution allows for access to real-time and historical energy and power data from electrical equipment. Facility and energy management personnel can use this in-depth data to simplify decisions targeting enhanced electrical reliability, efficiency and safety.

“The new PXG 900 is equipped with a more powerful, yet simplified, user interface to provide efficient, information-rich oversight of energy and power systems,” said Rick Schear, product manager at Eaton. “The new model is a single solution capable of fulfilling most electrical communications needs that can be quickly deployed in facilities of all sizes to help improve electrical system performance.”

The flexible and expandable PXG 900 can be used in a small system consisting of a single piece of equipment or scaled up for multiple pieces of equipment or systems. The gateway may be installed in electrical assemblies or systems to acquire and consolidate data from components such as trip units, meters, relays, drives, and input/output (I/O) devices. The gateway can also be quickly deployed as a data aggregation and notification solution for switchgear, switchboards, panelboards, transfer switches and motor control centers.

Clear, concise Web pages are designed to offer instant and remote access to device status, energy and power information such as current, voltage, power, energy, frequency, power factor, and harmonic distortion through a system summary status pane or individual device detail pages. The online management portal also allows users to proactively set alarm notifications that warn of underperforming equipment and conditions threatening uptime.

For in-depth data analysis, users can easily generate and export activity logs based on alarm history or historical device data in table, graph or chart format. Additionally, users can easily create, view and update a one-line electrical representation of their electrical system with animations and color-coding that indicates device status.

Further, the PXG 900 can be paired with Eaton’s Power Xpert Insight® software to view multiple gateways alongside other power systems equipment while enabling more extensive power and energy monitoring and notification features. The gateway can also be seamlessly integrated with a wide variety of building management and monitoring systems for unified facility monitoring and management.

To help minimize selection, installation and configuration time and labor, the new model is engineered with intuitive configuration menus and standardized device support. Eaton’s PXG 900 also integrates with existing Ethernet network infrastructure and supports common industrial protocols including INCOM and Modbus® RTU.

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As industrial markets evolve to unlock the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT), Rockwell Automation and Cisco have announced new additions to their Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) architectures to help operations technology (OT) and information technology (IT) professionals address constantly changing security practices. The latest CPwE security expansions, featuring technology from both companies, include design guidance and validated architectures to help build a more secure network across the plant and enterprise.

The Industrial IoT is elevating the need for highly flexible, secure connectivity between things, machines, work flows, databases and people, enabling new models of policy-based plant-floor access. Through these new connections, machine data on the plant floor can be analyzed and applied to determine optimal operation and supply-chain work flows for improved efficiencies and cost savings. A securely connected environment also enables organizations to mitigate risk with policy compliance, and protects intellectual property with secure sharing between global stakeholders.

Core to the new validated architectures is a focus on enabling OT and IT professionals to utilize security policies and procedures by forming multiple layers of defense. A defense-in-depth approach helps manufacturers by establishing processes and policies that identify and contain evolving threats in industrial automation and control systems. The new CPwE architectures leverage open industry standards, such as IEC 62443, and provide recommendations for more securely sharing data across an industrial demilitarized zone, as well as enforcing policies that control access to the plantwide wired or wireless network.

“The key to industrial network security is in how you design and implement your infrastructure and holistically address security for internal and external threats,” said Lee Lane, business director, Rockwell Automation. “The new guidance considers security factors for the industrial zone of the CPwE architectures, leveraging the combined experience of Rockwell Automation and Cisco.”

Rockwell Automation and Cisco have created resources to help manufacturers efficiently deploy security solutions. Each new guide is accompanied by a white paper summarizing the key design principles, as follows:

The Industrial Demilitarized Zone Design and Implementation Guide and white paper provide guidance to users on securely sharing data from the plant floor through the enterprise.

The Identity Services Design and Implementation Guide and white paper introduce an approach to security policy enforcement that tightly controls access by anyone inside the plant, whether they’re trying to connect via wired or wireless access.

“Security can’t be an afterthought in today’s plant environment. As we connect more devices and create more efficient ways of operating, we also create certain vulnerabilities,” said Bryan Tantzen, senior director, Cisco. “Cisco and Rockwell Automation have been teaming for nearly a decade on joint solutions, serving as the standards-based resource for security in industrial environments. These new architectures and guides build on our collaboration by helping organizations recognize and proactively address today’s security concerns.”

Companies can now take advantage of industry-leading solutions from Rockwell Automation and Cisco to address security from a holistic perspective. Together, the two companies provide a common, scalable architecture for ruggedized industrial Ethernet and enterprise networks, along with unique services, such as security assessments and managed security, to help manufacturers define and meet performance metrics and scale in-house resources.

Technip, in a consortium with Petrovietnam Technical Services Corporation (PTSC), has been awarded a engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning contract by PetroVietnam Fertilizer and Chemicals Corporation (PVFCCo). The project covers the revamping of the ammonia plant at the existing Phu My Fertilizer Complex, located in southern Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, Vietnam.

The plant upgrade will increase the current ammonia output by 20% at the Phu My Fertilizer complex, using Haldor Topsoe technology. The ammonia will notably be used as feedstock for a new NPK plant and for the domestic market supply.

Technip’s operating centers in Rome, Italy; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam will execute the contract. The expanded ammonia plant will be brought into operation in the second half of 2017.

KK Lim, President of Technip in Asia Pacific, commented: "We are delighted to be working with PVFCCo again, having engineered and built the initial Phu My Fertilizer Complex which was successfully commissioned in 2004. This award reinforces our long lasting relationship and demonstrates the client’s continued confidence in Technip as a leader in the fertilizer sector which offers solutions based on the world reputed Haldor Topsoe process technology.”.

ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has won an order from offshore services provider Bumi Armada Berhad to supply electrification and automation systems for a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel for a recently discovered oilfield off the coast of Angola. The order was booked in the first quarter.

Bumi Armada, an international offshore services provider based in Malaysia, is building the FPSO by reconfiguring the former Armada Ali supertanker (now renamed the Armada Olombendo FPSO), which has a storage capacity of 1.8 million barrels. The Italian energy company Eni is chartering the vessel.

It will be positioned over the Cabaça North and Cabaça Southeast fields, about 350 kilometers northeast of Luanda, and producing up to 80,000 barrels a day by the end of 2016. With fields so far off shore and 500 meters below the ocean’s surface, the vessel will control the entire extraction process, storing oil and gas until they can be offloaded to shuttle tankers.

To enable and monitor safe and reliable operations, ABB will deliver complete e-house solutions - which house medium voltage and low voltage switchgear - and systems for integrated electrical distribution, control, safety and power management, including ABB’s 800xA distributed control system.

“FPSO vessels offer a competitive solution for the development of deep water and remote oil and gas fields, such as those in the West of Africa. We are pleased to contribute to Bumi Armada Berhad’s latest FPSO project to ensure safe and reliable floating production,” said Stein Guldbrandsoy, ABB’s Global Market Segment Manager for Floating Production Units.

“We aim for long-term partnerships with customers through successful project execution, innovative offshore technology and an extensive service footprint," said Per Erik Holsten, Managing Director for ABB's Oil, Gas and Chemicals business.

ABB’s systems will distribute and manage power necessary to inject 120,000 barrels of water a day into the reservoir and to compress up toDocument Link Icon 120,000 million cubic feet of natural gas.

This order is the fourth collaboration between ABB and Bumi Armada, the fifth largest FPSO supplier in the world. Past projects include a modular e-house package for FPSO vessels operating off India’s west coast, the Kraken oil field in the North Sea and a complete automation package for an FPSO vessel operating in the Balnaves oil field off western Australia.

Eni is the concessionaire of the Cabaça fields, which were discovered in 2009. They’re estimated to have a capacity of some 230 million barrels. The total value of Bumi Armada Berhad’s contract to supply, operate and maintain the FPSO is about $2.9 billion.

The new ADAM-3600 is an intelligent RTU designed to work in the hardest environments with minimal physical contact from engineers once installed. The ADAM-3600 utilizes Advantech’s TagLink Technology, a modular wireless expansion system and wide operating temperatures.

TagLink is a new embedded technology which allows engineers to assign real meaning to the data they manage and makes them easy to maintain. It frees users from the hard work of processing the raw data and provides a unified interface for different protocol servers, which enables engineers to use C programming, Softlogic, WebAccess, SCADA software and RESTful/HTML to communicate directly with 3rd party devices. It also supports data interlock to prevent conflicting access from different applications. These features ensure that the data from ADAM-3600 can be accessed from the IoT cloud.

The ADAM-3600 with two Ethernet ports and three serial (one RS-485/232 and two RS-485) ports has been designed with modularity and space saving in mind. It doesn’t require much extra space to add additional I/O, wireless, GPRS devices within small cabinets. This modular approach enables engineers to quickly and easily change the functionality of the ADAM-3600 with the need to buy expensive whole units or be concerned about space issues. Coming soon are analog digital input and output modules, relay modulesand thermocouplemodules for added functionality.

As is expected from a product designed to work in remote locations the ADAM-3600 has several features to help it withstand the rigors of the weather. Having been designed with industrial grade components, the ADAM-3600 has a wide operating temperature of between -40oC to 70oC and meets the requirements of C1D2.

In a recent move, Emerson announced it has acquired Energy Solutions International Holdings, Inc. (ESI), a leading global supplier of decision support software and services that enhance operational efficiency, commercial profitability and safety across the oil and gas pipeline, storage, marketing and distribution functions.

The acquisition of ESI expands Emerson’s capability to provide complete solutions for automation and operations management throughout the oil and gas transportation industry. ESI’s integrated suite of operational management applications for pipeline modeling, leak detection, and scheduling together with their commercial applications for transactional accounting and inventory management are recognized for improving both operational efficiency and financial profitability. ESI will join Emerson Process Management and become part of the Remote Automation Solutions​ group, a leading global provider of oil and gas supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and fiscal measurement solutions.

“Energy Solutions International’s leading position in these industries is a great strategic fit for Emerson Process Management’s oil and gas SCADA business,” said Craig Llewellyn, president of Emerson Process Management’s Remote Automation Solutions. “Our pipeline and terminal customers are facing increasing challenges to maintain safe operations and achieve financial success, and ESI together with Emerson allows us to offer a complete spectrum of automation and application solutions to help them achieve their goals.”

TengBeng Koid, ESI’s CEO, added “Joining a recognized technology leader with a global presence like Emerson represents a great opportunity for ESI to expand our business growth. ESI together with Emerson is a powerful combination and together will enable us to solve our oil and gas transportation customers’ most difficult automation and operational challenges.”

National Instruments, the provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, announced today the NI PXIe-8880 controller, which is based on the Intel® Xeon® processor, and the NI PXIe-1085 chassis, which is the industry’s first chassis that uses PCI Express Gen 3 technology. The combination of the eight-core, server-class Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2618L v3 and full system bandwidth of 24 GB/s delivers breakthrough performance for computationally intensive and highly parallel applications such as wireless test, semiconductor test and 5G prototyping. Customers can take advantage of the flexibility of the PXI platform to replace previous generation controllers with the NI PXIe-8880 and see up to double the performance in their test and measurement applications.

“Over the past two decades, we have witnessed a gradual shift from traditional instrumentation in favor of the PXI platform for automated test,” said Jessy Cavazos, industry manager for measurement and instrumentation at Frost & Sullivan. “With the addition of Intel® Xeon® processor technology, we expect the adoption of PXI to only increase for high-performance applications.”

NI collaborated with Intel to deliver the server-class power of Intel® Xeon® processors to the test and measurement market. The embedded controller features eight cores, up to 24 GB of DDR4 memory and 24 lanes of PCI Express Gen 3 connectivity to the backplane. This provides engineers and scientists with up to twice the processing power and bandwidth compared to previous generation controllers. In addition, the new 18-slot chassis incorporates PCI Express Gen 3 technology with eight lanes per slot for a matched total system bandwidth of 24 GB/s, so any test and measurement system can scale well into the future.

“The use of the latest Intel® Xeon® processors is a new milestone for our collaboration with NI,” said Shahram Mehraban, director of market development for Industrial IoT at Intel. “The Internet of Things requires the highest possible processing power to reduce time to market and lower the cost of test, and NI’s approach with PXI is critical toward that goal.”

When paired with LabVIEW system design software, this next-generation PXI controller and chassis combination empowers engineers and scientists to turn 24 GB/s of test and measurement data into readily usable insight.

The latest addition to the market-leading range of gearboxes manufactured by Rotork Gears is a rugged, industrial grade product designed for use with motorised quarter-turn valves and dampers.

The new AB550M gearbox is manufactured as standard with cast iron housing components, high performance axial thrust bearings, a protected steel input shaft and a polyurethane coating to deal with arduous applications and aggressive environments. The ability to support electric actuators weighing up to 46 kilograms and input speeds of up to 72 rpm offers suitability for many applications in the chemical, power generation, water & sewage treatment, HVAC and general industries.

With a maximum output torque of 600 Nm, 45mm maximum output bore, output flange sizes from F07 to F16 and +/-5º adjustable 90º stroke, the AB550M will operate a large range of ball, butterfly and plug valves, or power and process dampers.

The ambient operating temperature range can extend from -60ºC to +200ºC, whilst the standard IP67 environmental protection can be increased to IP68 for marin