Shift up a gear IN CONTROL

At this month's Control & Instrumentation Europe exhibition in Birmingham, one of the biggest players in the control marketplace is focusing its attention on some of the smaller operators in the process industries. With the UK launch of its DeltaV PC-based control system, Fisher-Rosemount looks set to shake up that area of the market so far served by systems made up of ad hoc combinations of PLCs, PCs, single loop controllers and the like - typically those plants requiring less than 500 I/O for their control and monitoring.

What differentiates DeltaV from such systems is, simply, speed. There are other factors, of course, which we shall come to later. But, as F-R's promotional claims put it, DeltaV lets you `accelerate improvement in your plant's performance, right out of the box.' According to F-R's small systems business manager, Rob Train, the smaller processors do not have the in-house resources to cope with complicated system configuration: `the entry cost of systems based on PLCs and MMIs (man machine interfaces) may be small, but their installation and operating costs can be huge.'

Admittedly, Train puts the initial outlay for a DeltaV system at some 15-20 per cent more than a PLC/MMI type system for the same application. But, he reports, systems integrators involved in the early trials of DeltaV have seen savings in installation time and costs of anywhere between 40 and 60 per cent. The bottom line, he says, could therefore be DeltaV systems working out 15 to 20 per cent cheaper overall.

So, what is DeltaV, and what else is different about it? Although it has F-R's wealth of experience with distributed control systems behind it, DeltaV is a totally new development for the company and took some two years to come to fruition. With the help of Microsoft, which contributed around eight million lines of source code to add to its one million, F-R has produced a system written from scratch in 32-bit code specifically for Windows NT 4.0 and its familiar Windows 95 interface.

Basically, DeltaV is a small, wall-mounted system complete with power supply, controller and I/O modules. Up to four controllers and workstations can be connected to each DeltaV network, with dual redundancy throughout. Up to 500 I/O points can be handled, in increments of eight at a time. Train even says that `because of its modularity, power and the Performance Software add-ons (part of F-R's PlantWeb strategy, see PE, October 1996, p31), we think that DeltaV can be economically applied in applications with as few as three or four I/O.'

STANDARD HARDWARE

Like the demonstration system shown to PE at Fisher-Rosemount Systems' Leicester factory - where the systems are produced - DeltaV can run off a standard desktop Dell Pentium Pro 200MHz workstation networked to the system over a 10Mbit Ethernet using TCP/IP and UDP/IP communications protocols.

That's `behind the scenes' as it were; `front of stage' is what has to be some of the easiest configuration and operating procedures to be found in a control system of this complexity. Because DeltaV is based on just one integral database, navigating around the system is as easy as using Windows 95 for any other application. There are no gateways needed to link disparate databases together. Configuration is simplified through the use of libraries of pre-engineered, reusable module templates and whole chunks of control strategies set up as graphical icons that can simply be `dragged and dropped' to configure the system.

OLE (object linking and embedding) compliance also means that the system is ready for the emerging OPC (OLE for Process Control) standards that will allow process data to be exchanged in real time between management information tools such as spreadsheets and databases.

Although difficult to demonstrate on a simulated system, audio-visual effects can also be incorporated into the operator's station. `This facility will be particularly valuable,' says Train, `for when AMS (F-R's Asset Management System, see again PE, October 1996, p31), with its alarm capabilities, is added to a DeltaV system.'

The engineering environment is just as straightforward as the operator's. As long as you know your process, you should be able to configure a control system for it with DeltaV - intuitively, and probably more quickly than you might think. Even absolute beginners are taken by the hand by a Microsoft-style `Wizard' and led through the basics of configuration.

Clearly, a DeltaV demonstration is impressive. But what of its real world applications? First introduced three months ago in the US, the system is currently installed in 24 sites there (ten of which acted as beta test sites) with a further five in Europe. The first UK system is already in operation on a boiler control application for Staveley Chemicals in Derbyshire.

According to Fisher-Rosemount, a starting price of around £3000 buys a 32 I/O licence which includes everything you need to create a complete control solution. But a system can easily be extended by simply adding more I/O modules on the fly, without even closing it down.

This `plug and play' approach also extends to interoperability with F-R's Provox and System 3 DCSs. So, it's not just DeltaV that is highly scaleable - so too now is Fisher-Rosemount's entire process control portfolio.

Now, what was that DCS v PLC v PC debate all about again?