Smart Automation & Smart Electrical

There are numerous IIoT articles and papers on additional smart data from automation systems and electrical systems to assist in improvements in asset performance, asset maintenance, energy efficiency and asset reliability. In many cases, this additional data was either previously not available or not available at a reasonable cost. This data can bring significant additional value through increased throughput, higher efficiency and/or lower operating costs. 

There is another area that requires attention in hardware and software development. There are many established and even proven processes and designs in the automation and electrical areas that either consume a lot of time, require a lot of resources, require a lot of manual steps, include a lot of hardware or require a lot of error checking. With either current technology or new enabling technology, many of these processes can be eliminated, simplified or automated. These efficiency improvements can be made while improving the quality of the finished product.

The traditional means to program a Safety Instrumented System (SIS) included process and loss prevention engineers creating the cause & effect diagrams for a facility and then an instrument engineer programming each safety loop, loop by loop, to comply with the cause & effects diagrams. Since the loop creation was performed manually, each loop had to be verified, loop by loop, to ensure the loops were in full compliance. This entire effort was labor intensive and time consuming but this has been the means to program a facility’s SIS for many decades. Today, there are translators that can take the cause & effect diagrams in electronic form and program the SIS directly. There is still some manual work that must be performed but it is significantly reduced. Additionally, the verification work has been significantly reduced. Plus, the cause & effects can be synchronized with the SIS programming such that when the cause & effects change, the SIS programming is automatically changed. This is the type of improvement that should be pursued for many traditional project activities.

Why can’t a similar improvement be developed for electrical power system protection? Why can’t the power system analyses be linked to the setting of the numerous protection relays and devices? This would eliminate a significant number of manual activities, reduce the amount of verification work and update the protection relay settings when the power system analyses change.

The traditional way to create the control schematics for low voltage (480V) motor control is to locate stop/start, hand-off-automatic devices in the field, hardwire them back to the motor control center (MCC) and those along with a safety contract from the SIS and a control contact from the process control system, create different control schematics physically for each motor. This would result in a series of hardwired standard schematics (20-40) to control the low voltage motors for a facility. This requires a lot of hard wiring and a lot physical construction work. Why not connect the field devices to universal IO blocks mounted in the field in standard smart IO junction boxes, data highway the IO to the process control system or SIS and then data highway to the MCC and connect back to universal IO for a single PCS and single SIS contacts in a single standard schematic for each motor? This eliminates a lot of hardwiring and a lot of physical construction work. It also makes the hardwired schematic for all low voltage motors the same. Plus, the actual schematic to control a motor will be in software and can be easily changed. This is a much more efficient manner to control motors within a facility.

These are the types of non-conventional methods to achieve the desired results in a significantly more efficient manner. These are the types of improvements that must be considered to reduce engineering and construction hours for a major project. Targets for these types of improvements include any activity that consumes a lot of time, requires a lot of resources, includes a lot of manual steps and/or may involve a lot of rework. Doing things the way that have always been done is no longer sufficient. Designers and engineers must think differently to find non-traditional ways to reduce the cost, time and resources to deliver projects.