Mobile PantWeb Hits the Road

Check out the pics below – this new tool to help demonstrate Emerson’s Plant Web functionality is being put through its paces at REM Services, Inc. The Plant Web Mobile Demo was constructed in St. Louis by FabCon and rides in a specially modified panel truck. The unit will be used to train Emerson and Emerson Local Business Partner personnel in the Southeast region of the US. A limited number of customer demonstrations and shows will be scheduled over the next few months so watch the highways and byways of the Carolinas to catch a glimpse of this beauty.

All devices are installed and configured to demonstrate Plant Web Alert functionality using a DeltaV Scalable Process System and AMS Intelligent Device manager.

Larry Wolfe of REM Services gave me a tour inside and out, along with a test drive – this thing is way cool.

Massive ARRAY Storage In DeltaV

OK, I'll admit I'm old school, but I sure did like global registers back in my PROVOX days. And I've longed for them in DeltaV for a while. In fact, I did something about it.

While the ARRAY parameter type is OK in DeltaV, it really lacks the size offered by PROVOX global registers (rows x columns <= 255 and rows <= 127). So I’ve created something I call the Enhanced Array Parameter composite or EAP. With the EAP, you get 10,000 floating point addressable storage locations in a single, easy to interface linked composite you can drop into any DeltaV module.

Right now, it’s more of a flat file storage option (like the global registers), but I’m wanting to turn it into a 100 x 100 array – who knows, maybe I can even build in some matrix math.

The EAP is available now from REM Services as a licensable product – drop me a note if you’re interested. I’d also be interested in any opinions on matrices and matrix math in a DeltaV module – is it worth the effort or a waste of time?

PCA and DeltaV

Emerson just held their annual Global User Exchange in Dallas, TX. The event is getting bigger every year, which means, unfortunately, it’s getting harder to find the gems of take-away information.

One of the outstanding presentations was a joint workshop between Emerson and Lubrizol on their work with Principle Components Analysis (PCA) in batch processes entitled “Coupling Process Control Systems and Process Analytics to Improve Batch Operations”.

Robert Wojewodka of Lubrizol gave the best non-technical analogy of PCA I’ve ever seen. If you were in attendance, be sure and take a look at the PowerPoint supplied at the conference. If you didn’t make it, find someone who did and get a copy.

The results will be presented next year on trials they have planned for this winter in France, so stay tuned.

Always Know Your Datalink Counts

Here's an interesting tidbit I got from Scott Thompson of REM Services - to make sure you always get the Datalink count dialog box when you save changes to a graphic display in DeltaV Operate configure mode:

• Go to frsVariables -> misc_glb -> gb_AlwaysShowDatalinkCount parameter
• Right-click on the parameter and select Property Window
• Edit the Current and InitialValue fields to be True
• Save the frsvariables by doing a right-click on frsvariables and selecting Save