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System provides access to 6 years worth of data

An ABB Automation Tech (Instrumentation + Automation) product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Dec 14, 2004

ABB has given British Nuclear Group, part of BNFL, the ability to access 2Tbyte of production data following the installation of an information management system at the Sellafield site.

ABB has given British Nuclear Group, part of BNFL, the ability to access 2Tbyte of production data following the installation of an information management system at the Sellafield site.

The system is designed to manage production information from Vitrification Lines1, 2 and Line 3.

With the installation of the system, British Nuclear Group now has real-time monitoring of production data.

John Rogers, Project Manager for British Nuclear Group, says: "The data is now available to a wide range of people throughout the plant, whereas it was previously only accessible at a small number of localised workstations".

"The system provides desktop access for plant operations and technical and manufacturing support staff, giving them the ability to analyse trends, monitor performance metrics and predict future performance".

Based on AspenTech's IP.21 information management system, data are fed from the existing ABB MOD300 distributed control systems, as well as two other control systems.

The data from the MOD300 systems is acquired via two EH OPC servers (one per line system) using ABB's EH Connect software and is then made available to the user via the AspenTech IP.21 System.

As an approved supplier of programmable electronic systems to British Nuclear Group, ABB was asked to supply the AspenTech IP.21 solution based on previous experience with this product family.

A major challenge of the project was that British Nuclear Group required six years of online data to be available.

ABB assessed the size of memory needed for this amount of data, revealing a requirement of almost 2Tbyte.

The eventual solution involved a RAID unit with 14 interchangeable online hard drives of 146Gbyte each.

The available memory for online data is configured into 72 repositories, one per month.

Additional historic data from legacy systems can also be stored in six additional repositories set aside as part of the configuration of the RAID unit.

ABB Project Manager Andy Howieson explains: "The system was certainly a challenge in terms of the amount of data to be stored, including the integration of non-ABB products with our own systems".

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