Power Plant Automation: Where We Are and Where We’re Headed

Roger A. Leimbach,

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Supporting Applications to Optimize Assets

At the heart of the automation system are tools and advanced applications to allow gencos, their experts around the world, and automation suppliers to access information and real-time data from a portal to the automation system, and hence to the entire corporate business system (Figure 4). Thus, a community of experts all with the same objectives can collaborate. Additionally, performance-enhancing products and services can be provided through the portal to increase efficiency and minimize downtime. Clearly, bullet-proof tools for information security, notification management, messaging, and application integration are required.

4. Cutting-edge access. Automation systems must facilitate predictive and condition-based collaborative maintenance management at the plant. Connectivity is provided to other corporate business systems, and information security must be guaranteed. Source: Metso Automation USA Inc.

Automation systems must include tools to enable remote proactive maintenance, to monitor and collect data from a system’s network and send notifications to the appropriate center of excellence, where it can be analyzed. Information from any plant device such as pumps, fans, valves, transmitters, electric motors, heat exchangers, boilers and turbine must be collected in real time. Also, quality and cost data are all available for scrutiny by experts anywhere in the world (Figure 5). A good example of how this technology can benefit an individual plant was provided in "Entergy’s Big Catch" in the October 2008 issue of POWER.

5. Future colleagues. Data and information will be transmitted to the automation supplier's center of excellence and to the owner's experts around the world. Enhancing the rate of return on plant assets requires expertise beyond the confines of the plant. Source: Metso Automation USA Inc.

The automation system then becomes a platform that runs or interfaces with many different application programs obtained from the "community." It becomes less and less a control system and more and more a recipient of supervisory optimization and control.

Automation companies can in some cases become suppliers of basic control systems, or platforms, for application experts located within the genco or for other consultants within the "community." This means that automation system platforms need to be, just like Linux, an "open system" for all to use, improve, and integrate (see sidebar).

How Do Communities Work?

The community model facilitated by the Internet is now being adopted by various industries. Perhaps the best example of an Internet community success story is that of the Linux operating system.

Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He began his work in 1991. Torvalds worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License, and its source code is freely available to everyone. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals who have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel.

When the computing community embraced Linux as its own, it became a world-class operating system, developed by a community of people sharing information. As with the World Wide Web (excepting firewalled or secured sites), all data are available to all users, regardless of their location or time of day.

Similarly, with the latest automation systems, power plant staff can access their community whenever they want and discuss problems within forums that contain records of all events. Results are achieved through people interacting and collaborating. New ideas are sent to all parties in the community.

Well-functioning communities in a power generation environment bring people — including operators, maintenance staff, management, and engineering consultants — together to work toward the same results: targeted quality, maximum production, minimum environmental impact, and minimum costs.

Some gencos have established centers of excellence that support multiple plants around the world. Their expertise is available through the communication channels established in their automation system.

In the future, automation systems will integrate and access products and services focused on maximizing production and availability. The computers may be at a power plant, but the expertise and software will inevitably be located elsewhere. All will be available through portals to the outside world to reduce operating costs by optimizing all the plant’s processes as a whole rather than piecemeal. The system will avoid unit trips through the use of condition-based monitoring and collaborative networks of experts, and it will provide for wide access to experts who can provide input on designs and operation.

In short, automation systems of the future will further improve plant reliability by leveraging communities of expertise with advanced, open information technology tools and hardware.

--Roger Leimbach (roger.leimbach@metso.com) is director of sales and marketing for Metso Automation USA Inc.

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