Industrial automation with PLCs is no longer limited by the walls of a production facility. More and more automation is being handled via remote communication, whether it’s from the office or from the comfort of your own home. Today’s PLCs give you the ability to access your modular plant control system to handle such tasks as monitoring via a website to determine the condition of a process or check other statistics. With the latest PLC technology, almost anything that can be accomplished next to the process can be accomplished wherever there is an internet connection.
Remote monitoring and control of equipment used within chemical, oil and gas industries is crucial for site managers, both from a commercial and safety aspect.
Often in developing countries, local stand-alone power systems are often more cost-effective than large utility grid extensions.
Various combinations of wind turbine generators, solar arrays, diesel gensets, and backup power batteries, means hybrid power systems present a more energy/cost efficient solution to diesel-only systems. These hybrid systems can be monitored from your iPad.
Benefits Include:
- Full control of your process, wherever you are.
- Gather operational data such as energy consumption, operating hours, temperatures, etc. in a database on the cloud.
- Start or stop your equipment remotely.
- Reduce maintenance by analyzing trends.
- Receive alarms via email or SMS when the process reaches certain parameter thresholds.
- Automatically generate reports via email.
- Connect the system to your own servers or applications.
Examples:
You are notified of an upward trend in sulfur dioxide stack concentration before there is a major environmental release at your sulfur recovery unit.
You are notified of an upward trend in vibration in a multistage compressor before there is a catastrophic failure allowing you to switch to the installed spare compressor without a visit to the plant.
You continuously monitor a heat transfer coefficient on a large shell and tube heat exchanger so that you know when a clean out is required.
Let Costello help you with the design of your Modular plant.