Electricity and Control April 2020

INDUSTRY 4.0 + IIOT

PC-based control technology for process automation

Benjamin Bruns, Product Manager - EX; Industry Manager - Process industry: Beckhoff Automation

Progress is not based on the innovative creation of buzzwords. Unfortunately, the development of enabling technologies in recent decades has not helped to raise process automation to an advanced level.The question we should ask is therefore: How can we build a suitable foundation for future innovations without violating the process industry’s demanding requirements regarding equipment availability and ease of use?

I n my years as a user of applications I often saw the reservations that automation engineers have when trying to adapt new technologies for use in the process industries. There are good reasons for this attitude, particularly in the oil and gas industry. The desire of operators to protect availability at all costs by implementing new technologies rather late or not at all is often referred to as the ‘race to be second’. From a user’s standpoint, there are good reasons for not being the first to implement an innovation. After all, the pressure to deliver is immense, because the market expects a permanent supply of resources. This means that the risks of implementing new technologies are difficult to assess and predict with regard to financial feasibility, safety and environmental concerns, and that is why process automation designers have developed a healthy scepticism towards new technologies. They don't trust buzzword-driven marketing campaigns and believe that suppliers often don't think in terms of actual applicability.

Creating real capacity for innovation These restraints, which are based on real market requirements, cannot be ignored. On the other hand, the need to innovate is increasing noticeably, due to a changing market environment. Where projects used to be planned in terms of years, today’s schedules are set in terms of months or even weeks. As a result, we are seeing a steadily increasing interest on the user side to evaluate new technologies intensively and develop suitable applications. The aim is to achieve improvements along the entire value chain by using the potential of modern technologies in practice-oriented optimisation approaches. As a supplier of PC-based control technologies, Beckhoff enables its partners to combine the DCS (Distributed Control System) level with the IT level, seamlessly. The expertise of system operators is often contained in proprietary software that requires the use of IT components. Today, on virtually every oil and gas platform, I keep seeing desktop PCs that run the software for calculating drill process algorithms. And the downstream control systems are no different. Since this software (for calculating drill process algorithms) cannot be installed on conventional automation systems, operators often resort to using hardware that was not designed for such applications and put the availability of their equipment at risk, due to the lack of suitable alternatives. Powerful industrial PCs combine two worlds Powerful and robust industrial PCs from Beckhoff provide a solution for this problem because they can handle both the automation tasks of the DCS and all IT level functions. As a result, operators can increase the total availability of systems and reduce the engineering effort.

4 Electricity + Control APRIL 2020