SCADA, Telematics & GPS Technologies

Audon Electronics is offering the Edam-9000 range of Ethernet-based industrial data acquisition and control RTU devices.

The Edam-9000 range is based on 10/100 Ethernet networking standards and supports the Modus/TCP protocol.

The Edam-9000 also supports UDP protocol over Ethernet networking.

There are six models in the range, covering voltage, thermocouple and PRT analogue inputs, digital inputs, pulse counting and transistor outputs.

All have a 10-30VDC power supply range, full opto-isolation and are housed in robust DIN rail mount enclosures.

Users can add Edam-9000 I/O modules to existing Ethernet networks or use Edam-9000 modules in new or existing SCADA systems.

source: Processing Talks

An Awarepoint white paper describes critical factors required to maximize your RFID system’s return on investment.

Real-time location systems (RTLSs) are an increasingly important strategic capability for a variety of business applications. RTLSs allow organizations to efficiently identify and track the location of supplies, personnel, equipment, and other items in real-time, as a cost-effective operational management tool.

With the success early adopters have had with RTLSs, the question is not whether to implement, but which technology is best suited for the many applications that can benefit from location awareness. An Awarepoint white paper, “Considering a Real-time Location System? First Consider the 5 Critical Success Factors,” can help maximize your return on investment and ensure long-term success of your RTLS investment.

“The implementation of RTLS technology should pay for itself as a result of shrinking the incidence of misplaced equipment, decreased rental costs, and increased utilization of equipment,” stated Jason Howe, CEO of Awarepoint Corp.

The five critical factors outlined in the white paper to obtain maximum benefit include:

• Enterprise-wide coverage—because assets and people move throughout your entire enterprise, to achieve maximum benefit, your RTLS deployment must cover every square inch of your enterprise.
• Location accuracy—to affect the highest impact for your strategic initiatives, room-level accuracy is a clear critical success factor.
• Installation and maintenance—a minimally invasive solution that does not compromise your existing IT network, does not interrupt daily business operations, and can be installed in days or weeks, is vital. Maintenance impact for hospital staff should be considered as well. It shouldn’t take a team of IT professionals to keep the system running.
• Interoperability—your RTLSs should be supported by standards-based technology and should offer an open application programming interface so that it’s capable of providing location and status data to both your end-users and to third-party applications.
• Low risk—you should partner with a vendor vested in your success. Look for a flexible business model that doesn’t require a large capital purchase or long-term contractual commitment, and allows you to easily expand assets as needed.

Added Howe, “In hospitals particularly, RTLSs can play an important role in automation of common tasks—improving operational efficiency, increasing patient flow, and enhancing patient safety. Knowing the location, status, and movement of equipment and people can be used to improve hospital business processes and asset utilization, reduce capital expense and rental costs, and improve staff productivity.”

The full white paper “Considering a Real-time Location System? First Consider the 5 Critical Success Factors” can be downloaded free off the company’s Web site.

ZigBee is a low-power communication system using digital radios. It’s intended to be easier to work with than Bluetooth. Adafruit recently added an adapter board for Digi’s XBee product line and has put together a great how-to to show the devices potential. Using two XBee radios and adapters you can wirelessly program an Arduino board. This would be great if your Arduino was installed in an inaccessible area or maybe it’s over 100feet away from where you’re working. The radios do serial communication just fine. What the how-to covers is getting the reset line working so the Arduino can restart automatically after you program it. Once the radio pair is configured properly, it will pass the RTS line state directly from one device to the other.

Source: Hack a day

Yokogawa Electric has released the DXadvanced R3 data acquisition and display station for networks.

The product is an enhanced version of the Daqstation series of paperless recorders designed for more efficient monitoring of production lines.

The DXadvanced has a built-in panel and offers integrated display, recording and communication functions.

GainSpan has a chip that can curb energy consumption in the home, and notify your doctor if you’re about to have a heart attack.

The company has produced an energy efficient WiFi chip that it hopes to install in dryers, electrical meters and other devices in the home. The idea is that utilities and consumers will shut off and/or power down appliances with wireless signals remotely to curb electricity consumption.

GainSpan is currently working with manufacturers to insert its chip into cold storage units, meters and other devices. Hitachi Plant Technologies, the industrial technology arm of the Japanese giant, makes sensors incorporating GainSpan’s chips. The company was spun out of Intel.
Source: GreenTechMedia

The Z-Wave Home Control standard expands its reach with the announcement of the Advanced Energy Control Framework (AEC), a specification for advanced energy management technologies that empower homeowners to make informed decisions for energy consumption and monitor home devices. Z-Wave’s AEC will integrate smart metering, consumer notification, automated load shedding and home controls to enable real-time energy management and to help reduce energy demand, lower utility costs and provide active control over home energy consuming devices. Zensys presents the AEC at the Metering Europe event in Amsterdam (Booth J15) between the 22nd and 24th of September, 2008.

“The Z-Wave Advanced Energy Control Framework is a breakthrough in home energy management that will allow homeowners to actively monitor utility costs and demand response in order to save energy and money while reducing their carbon footprint,” says Mark Walters, chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance. “Some utilities are looking to use smart meters to dynamically adjust billing rates based on energy consumption. With AEC we can notify the homeowner of these changes so they can make informed decisions on how they want to consume energy. With Z-Wave and AEC the power to conserve is in the hands of homeowners, not the utilities.”

Transparency and management reduce energy costs
Most consumers receive only one electricity meter reading per month, providing little insight into their daily energy consumption and habits. With Z-Wave’s AEC, consumers can view their energy consumption anytime and anywhere in order to determine when they are using the most energy, and then can work to reduce overuse. Homeowners can also respond to utility billing structures, such as time-of-use pricing and tariff schedules, to minimize energy usage at peak times.

“With its undisputed strength in interoperability and its range of available products, Z-Wave does not only provide for the simple communication from an electricity meter to a gateway and a wireless display in the home,” says Roar Seeger, CEO of Modstroem, a Danish utility company. “It also enables the control of devices in the home that actually consume the power. Especially this second aspect is essential for Modstroem’s advanced service and key to actually achieving energy reduction without compromising comfort for the consumer.”

Z-Wave’s large selection of interoperable home energy control devices enables AEC solutions for a range of consumer scenarios, from simple energy monitoring with smart meters and home displays, to fully integrated device networks including thermostats, home control panels, gateways, sensors, controlled lighting, window coverings and other electrical devices. All the data is collected through an easy-to-understand central Z-Wave control interface that provides homeowners with the information they need to best manage their energy consumption.

Metering Europe: movement in the utility market
This year, the tenth anniversary of the Metering, Billing/CRM Europe takes place in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Since the European member states have opened their electricity and gas markets to competition, the demand for solutions which enable an efficient use of energy and lower the costs increases rapidly. So the investments in smart metering technologies are on the rise. Against this background Zensys will present its Advanced Energy Control Framework in Amsterdam and explain the benefits of the new solution with regard to energy efficiency and the management of consumption.

Source: Sensor News

Using the ZigBee wireless protocol, Fourier Systems’ DataNet wireless data loggers offer 4 recording inputs for direct measurement and recording of PT-100 thermocouple (J, K, and T), voltage, current, frequency, and pulse. The devices come with internal temperature sensors, a 4-channel RF logger, operating keypad, LCD display, and a monitoring network. Long range monitoring is possible with multiple alarms, including SMS and e-mail, to any location. Each unit serves as a transmission repeater to neighboring units to form a mesh network of up to 65,000 nodes.

Source: ECN

Sometime, the GPRS coverage & priority issue is a turning down subject in our AVLS operations. Despite of GPS data errors and interferences, we choose to add SMS  mode for failsafe function to our AVLS architecture. It’s not really a big deal to develope the back engine, but in considering the alarm dispacthing functions. Maybe, it will become another turning down factor in our bussiness. the dispatcher should be really intelligent to determine the raw data despite of many of uncertainty factors that always bother. We bought a quad-core dell 1U rack server in order to replace our old beloved application server, a 4 pentium 4 Dell 5U tower server. We done doing upgrades to database server, and now working on the back-end & front-end application test. In another hand, we are migrating the Telemery System for waterworks…. developing a friendly GUI for Flood Monitoring System plus testing the alarm dispatching functions, still handling data loses in ABB EM meters integrations… sigh!

Evonik Industries, a leading chemical, energy and real estate company based in Essen, Germany, is the world’s largest producer of ultra-pure chemicals for the photovoltaic industry. It chose ABB’s flagship System 800xA automation platform to control the complex production process at its new site expansion in Germany.

The expansion will enable Evonik to triple production of ultra-pure chlorosilanes, raw material in the production of photovoltaic (PV) silicon. PV silicon is the substance from which solar-grade silicon wafers are made, which are the key components in solar cells and solar power systems.

Photovoltaic or solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity, and are commonly made of silicon (like the blocks above), a semiconductor material. When light strikes the cell, it creates a flow of electrons, or an electrical current.

Evonik is the world’s leading supplier of ultra-pure chlorosilanes, and the only company to operate dedicated chlorosilane production sites for the fast-growing solar energy industry.

The company’s lead site for the production of ultra-pure chlorosilanes is at Bitterfeld in Germany, which is one of the largest chemical parks in Europe.

When the Bitterfeld plant expansion is completed early in 2009, it will be linked by pipeline to an adjoining factory currently being built by PV Crystalox Solar, the world’s largest manufacturer of multi-crystalline wafers for solar cell modules.

To ensure production reliability and process excellence at the site, Evonik selected ABB to evolve and expand the existing distributed control system into a new plant-wide solution.

The solution is based on ABB’s flagship automation platform, Extended Automation System 800xA – ranked by automation industry analyst ARC Advisory Group as the world’s leading distributed control system.

Solar cell technology has progressed significantly, and the energy payback time of a modern photovoltaic module is typically from 1 to 4 years.

The solution enables Evonik to enhance its existing ABB Advant open control system to the latest version of System 800xA without interrupting production at the plant.

It allows Evonik to retain existing application programs and AC450 controllers and integrate them with new AC800M and AC800M HI (high integrity) controllers, Information Management software and System 800xA workplaces. ABB is also providing S900 explosion-proof I/O modules for high-risk production zones.

ABB supplied a similar solution for chlorosilane production to Wacker Chemie in for its production plant in Neunchritz, Germany, and is supplying the power plant automation system for Europe’s largest solar power plant, currently under construction in Spain.

Key features of Evonik’s installation based on System 800xA include:

• integrated safety and control functions
• emergency shutdown and rapid restart in critical situations
• full installation without interrupting production at the existing plant
• Evonik retains existing application programs which are integrated with new controllers, software and workplaces

Source: ABB

Telegesis UK has won a major order to supply its advanced Zigbee module products to TBN Energoservice of Russia TBN Energoservice specialises in the development of automatic meter reading (AMR) and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems using the latest technical developments.

TBN is implementing a major wireless water AMR system based on ZigBee radio technology.The system uses ZigBee mesh networking software and silicon delivered in module form via the ETRX2 module produced by Telegesis.In Russia, domestic water has traditionally been preheated in dedicated power plants and pumped directly to consumer’s apartments.

TBN is implementing a major wireless water AMR system based on ZigBee radio technology. The system uses ZigBee mesh networking software and silicon delivered in module form via the ETRX2 module produced by Telegesis. In Russia, domestic water has traditionally been preheated in dedicated power plants and pumped directly to consumer’s apartments. Read more on this article…