Plant control system upgraded

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 25, 2005

MSE-Tetragenics has upgraded its PCS plant control system with updates to both hardware and software, providing complete monitoring and control capabilities for a wide variety of applications.

MSE-Tetragenics has upgraded its PCS plant control system with updates to both hardware and software.

The MSE-Tetragenics' PCS provides complete monitoring and control capabilities for a wide variety of industrial applications, such as hydro power plants, utility substations, communications towers, water and wastewater plants, energy management systems, and industrial building security systems.

The system provides reliable and cost-effective controls for all facets of generation and switchyard operation, including voltage control, VAR control, breaker control, generator start/stop, synchronisation, pump control, and multiple-generator load control with optimisation in one integrated system.

Water-related controls include pond level, tailrace level, minimum flow, headgate position, spillway level and fish ladder control.

Plant security and dam integrity monitoring are also available.

The PCS G4 remote terminal unit (RTU) offers many advantages including enhanced performance, a real-time operating system, multiple interfaces and protocol support, easily expandable I/O, support of various HMI clients, and integrated SOE and alarm queuing.

The G4 board features performance up to 73MIPS, supports up to nine onboard serial ports with a serial port expansion board, and additional peripheral ports.

The RTU supports the full range of hardware I/O - digital inputs, analogue inputs, counters, analogue outputs and digital outputs.

There are many variations of I/O card types to meet customer needs, most having 32 points per card.

The system can have up to two expansion chassis with 21 card slots each for scalability for small systems to large systems.

The RTU also supports many types of controls such as discrete, PID, analogue output and sequential control.

Onboard software enhancements include the MSE-Tetragenics MC3000 Scada Master in real-time Linux, dynamic port assignments, built-in communications analyser, DNP 3.0 and Modbus protocol support, ability for remote downloads, Ethernet connectivity to remote clients, and a built-in web server.

The PCS operating system is RTLinuxPro, that provides flexible and scalable run-time software and extreme reliability.

Features include wide support with many CPU architectures, an open design that is highly portable across many processors, over 1800 application program interfaces, high performance microkernel design (fast multitasking, interrupt support and preemptive and round robin scheduling), high compatibility with embedded hardware products, comprehensive networking facilities (optimised TCP/IP for real-time applications), and easy porting to MSE-Tetragenics hardware.

The PCS VMEbus architecture is robust and has a proven design.

It provides address and data path dynamic selection, bandwidths up to 80Mbyte/s, powerful interrupt structure and protocol, multiprocessing capability and user-defined I/O.

The structure is processor independent, with open architecture, and long-term viability.

MSE-Tetragenics' MC3000 Scada Master is the key component of the PCS.

It can control multiple plants within a system comprised of hundreds of RTUs or PLCs.

The software is configurable and customisable to meet the needs of any industrial process.

When used with the MSE-Tetragenics WTV32 HMI, operators have a flexible, scalable, and easy to use interface to control plant processes.