Ensuring safety in case of an emergency and knowing in detail the events that led to the emergency state are critical considerations when selecting a process control system. These factors are important in two plants—a natural gas compression and treatment plant in Iran and a chemical detergents plant in Dubai—that include areas with high levels of risk and require control systems that can provide supervision and guarantee safety.
Both plants are managed by Delta V Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) from Emerson Process Management, in Austin, Texas, and H51q Emergency Shutdown Systems (ESDs) from Hima, based in Brühl, Germany. While the DCS system is complete, the ESD system only includes automation service and requires a supervision system that is able to manage alarm signals with a time definition of milliseconds precision.
In case of failures in the plant, the first alarm is followed by a sequence of other alarms linked together in a cause/effect relation. An ESD system basic requirement is to know the exact alarms chain, in order to go back to the first failure cause and determine the events sequence.
The ESD supervision has been realized through OPC connections provided by OPC clients for the Plant View Human-Machine Interface/Supervisory Control and Data Acquistion (HMI/SCADA) solution from FAST SpA, based in Rubiera, Italy, exchanging data with OPC servers from Hima using Data Access (DA) and Alarms & Events (A&E) OPC specifications.
Alarms chain under control
FAST supplies the ESD systems, the override consoles and the software for ESD configuration and supervision. The Plant View OPC A&E feature plays a critical role, allowing the representation of the exact sequence of events in an alarm list where each element has a millisecond precision time stamp. The supervision pages also show the cause/effect matrix, the ESD level diagrams and the system diagnostics, supplying plant engineers with the complete set of information to keep the system under control.
These realizations are significant examples of the interoperability between FAST’s Plant View HMI/SCADA solution and the Hima servers. Customers have expressed great satisfaction with the ease of use, performance and efficiency of the system. It has been a good opportunity to exchange know-how between engineers and technicians from the two companies and to improve competencies.
For more information about FAST SpA, visit www.fastautomation.it. For more information about Plant View HMI/SCADA, visit www.plantview.it.
