Industrial automation is very important and significant part of our technology. Those works that we are doing manually, labor cost will be very high. At an industry for a plant, if there is need 50 workers, we can do that by 1-5 workers by industrial automation. That’s why most of the industry dreams to get fully automotive. A Distributed Control System (DCS) is a platform for automated control and operation of a plant of any factory or industrial process. A DCS combines the following into a single automated system: Human Machine Interface (HMI), logic solvers, historian, common database, alarm management and a common engineering suite.
Yokogawa Electric
Corporation is a Japanese multinational electrical engineering and software
company distributed control systems provide the industry’s highest field-proven
system availability, enterprise-wide interoperability, extensive advanced
solutions portfolio and third-party-certified defense-in-depth cyber security
to increase productivity and improve plant operations. To present industrial
automation technique using DCS, I have presented here three step of automation.
We can say these three steps are three examples here. From a single Server PC
and a client PC, we can control these three plants.
- Fluid Control Plant
- Analog Digital Control Plant
- Factory Automation Plant
Fluid Control Plant
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| Fluid Control Plant |
From our server PC by
making a design and programming, we can control a complete fluid control plant.
You may think how it’s possible? For the progress of our advance technology, we
have enough kind of sensor whose can sense different types of object, objects
property and objects structural property. If this sensor can sense these
objects or sensible property, they generate an electrical signal. By using various
programming device, we can sense these data and make another one output for
another one device. By this the second device will be controlled by the first
device.
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| Connection of Fluid Control Plant |
Just like this, Fluid
control plants have different kind of sensor and that’s sense different data
from different junction. According their signal, we can make another one
decision for our expected output. These sensors are electrically two types. One
is Analog and another one is Digital.
Analog Digital Control Plant
In a factory or
manufacturing process, there are a lot of junction or operation points where
the product get ready step by step. Like as in a garments factory has may
junction and each junction has some labor. At a junction, the team of labor
does a single job repeatedly and they pass the product in the next step. By
this repeating process at different junction, the final product get ready.
By automation of
Distribution Control Process we can get this job of different junction automatically
and where will have to do which job, that decision will take using the sense of
different sensor. Suppose we will have to separate three types of ball- metal,
white color nonmetal and black color nonmetal. If we place three sensor- metal sensors,
color sensor (black), color sensor (white). When from different sensor, signal
will come, we will take different step to separate the ball. It is a simple automation
technique.
Factory Automation Plant
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| Factory Automation Plant |
In factory of industry plant a single automation can reduce a big amount of cost and a big number of employees. In the above we have understand two different automation techniques. In a plant of factory from one to a large amount of automation technique is used to make o finalize a product. The companies are also always trying to improve their automation technique day by day.
Software
of DCS
- Logic Designer: Functional Software.
- Fast/Tools: Graphical Software.
- Start Fast Tools.
- Stop Fast Tools.
- Engineering Module.
- Edit Module.
- Operation Interface.
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| From Yokogawa Electric Corporation |
Advantage
of DCS
The main advantage of
DCS is we can control a plant from a single operating station by lower amount
of employees. Another one most important advantage of DCS is- Cable cost
reducing. By using DCS, we can control a plant with lower amount of Ethernet
cable where by manual or others automation method, we have invest a big amount
for cable management. DCS reduce cable costing almost 50-60%. To purchase a
single DCS for a plant, you will have to pay a big amount of money, but don’t
worry only by cable cost reducing, you will be able to recover this.
Disadvantage of DCS
Decides big amount advantages DCS have some disadvantage also. Like as-
- A failure of one controller affects more than one loop and can make a big complexity.
- Lack of support for higher speed optical interface.
- People or labor will be jobless day by day for automation.
- Amount of floor space is required.
Every
system will have some advantage and disadvantage also, but to take higher
productivity, profit and technologically improved automation process is very
much important. And again for automation, DCS is more effective way.
Written
Jeion
Ahmed
Chittagong,
Bangladesh
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