Sometimes it’s easier to get your point across with less;
other times you wish you had more time or room to explain yourself. Submitting an abstract for Emerson Exchange
is like that – you end up having to be creative to get your point across in the
limited number of characters you’re allotted.
One place you hate to be limited is in your alarms. The more information you can provide your
operators, the better they’ll be able to respond. Back in version 11 of DeltaV, we added Alarm
Help functionality, to capture and display detailed information about an alarm,
what to do when the alarm comes in, and what might happen if no action is
taken.
And while you can get this detailed information for any
individual alarm, it would be nice if there was more information available when
you look at the Alarm Banner, the Alarm Summary display, or Process History
View.
So in version 12 of DeltaV, we’ve added a new feature called
Alarm Descriptions. You’ll find the Alarm
Description field on the Advanced tab when configuring an alarm in a control or
SIS module:
When you configure an Alarm Description, the text you
enter gets concatenated with the module description for use in the Alarm
Banner:
Alarm Banner without a
configured Alarm Description
Alarm Banner with a
configured Alarm Description
In the Alarm List screen, the Description field will
contain the module description or the new Alarm Description, if one exists:
Alarm List without a
configured Alarm Description
Background
Typically a control module would contain process
information associated with a single process signal or control loop. In this case, using DeltaV Alarm Types can
provide an acceptable level of detail associated with an alarm. While this may be adequate for single analog
control or monitor type control modules, additional descriptive information for
discrete types of alarms and SIS SIF modules are necessary.
The description shown in the alarm banner and alarm list
is associated with the module itself, not the process variables used within the
module. Because this information can be
critical for the operator to troubleshoot an interlock or safety trip, engineering
workarounds have been developed. These
include adding additional Alarms Types or new, separate modules to the system
whose sole purpose is to provide more descriptive information to the operator
when one of these events occurs.
Alarm Descriptions remove the need to create these extra
components and all the work associated with them while providing the operator
with the additional information he needs.
Now if I could just get additional information into my abstract
submission…
