New slant on control

With its small diagonal controllers, Honeywell’s new DCS immediately looks different from its competitors. Stuart Nathan investigates the new look, and what lies behind it In some areas of technology, small is beautiful.

We’re accustomed to ever-tinier mobile phones, cameras, music players, and even computers the size of a small stack of CDs. But this philosophy hasn’t been so prevalent in industrial design, where what a system can do has generally been seen as much more important than its physical design.

American distributed control system (DCS) major Honeywell is now taking a different tack. While telling journalists about new features was a major part of the launch of its latest iteration of the Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) DCS, the company was eager to point out the reason behind the system’s diminutive size and distinctive look.

The R300 series Experion PKS is specifically designed to occupy less space than previous versions, says sales support director for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Jean-Marie Alliet. Unlike most DCSs, the R300 is designed to occupy vertical, rather than horizontal, racks, reducing the footprint needed for a system.

Each individual module is built at an  18° angle to the vertical which, Alliet says, helps the system remain cool without requiring any extra fans. With the diagonally-oriented modules mounted above each other, the hot air generated by the electronics is shunted out to the side rather than rising into the next module up.

The R300 fits in with Honeywell’s policy of products being backward-compatible with previous systems. ‘New control systems are a ten to twenty year investment, so we make sure that we never make anything obsolete,’ explains Paul Orzeske, EMEA vice-president and general manager.

The system is in fact based on the previous iteration, the C200 controller, repackaged ‘to be consistent with the hardware form factor created for our new redundant I/O family, the series C I/O,’ says Honeywell.

The effect of this is that any control program written for the C200 will also run on the R300 with no need for any rewriting.The configuration also allows the wiring of the modules to be vertical, rather than the traditional horizontal. This eliminates 90-degree turns in the wiring, as the cables can enter the cabinet from the top or bottom and run directly to the appropriate terminal. This reduces installation costs and also makes maintenance much easier, as wiring routes are simpler and easier to locate, connect and disconnect.

Honeywell estimates that the new form of cabling saves three minutes per point on installation compared with traditional four-tier horizontal wiring — a small amount, maybe, but for a 5000 point project, that translates to a saving of $10 000.Space-saving is an important factor to many of Honeywell’s clients, Alliet says.

‘For refineries, for example, control systems are installed in technical rooms, which have to be made blast-proof. It’s expensive space, and you need to be able to make the most efficient use of it,’ Alliet says.

‘Also, it’s important right at the start of the installation process, with migration onto the new system. You have to have both systems running side-by-side for a while, and the older ones are naturally more bulky, so it’s very desirable to have the new system occupy as little space as possible.’

The new system can drastically reduce the footbprint needed for the control system, Alliet says — one customer reduced the number of configured cabinets in its control system by 34%.

Honeywell is the only DCS supplier to be working with the Abnormal System Management (ASM) Consortium of oil majors in the US, Alliet says. ASM, as the name implies, is trying to build into systems the ability to detect when processes are not running within their usual parameters and to bring them back into line. One of the fruits of this collaboration in the R300 is the Procedural Operations system.

‘We found that incidents often happen because experienced operators interpret routine operations such as start-ups and shut-downs extremely effectively. But these aren’t everyday operations, and if these operators aren’t around — if they’ve left or retired, or if they’re simply unavailable — other operators don’t know the systems as well, and make mistakes.’ 

A recent ASM survey found that 14% of all incidents could be attributed to faulty start-up procedures — a most notable and recent example of this is the explosion at BP’s Texas refinery.

The Procedural Operations system captures these best practice operations and encodes them into step-by-step instructions, prompting the operators via the HMI and, crucially, locking down the system between each step, so no steps can be omitted and the operations must be carried out in the correct order.

System security is also becoming increasingly important, and the R300 incorporates a firewall that will pass on only control-related messages to the controller. This prevents it becoming ‘flooded’ with unwanted Ethernet messages, or even from malicious attacks, that could slow down the system or even stop it from functioning altogether.

Also included is a backup and restore system, which allows users to schedule automated complete system backups while the system is on-line. The information ensures that if the system does fail, it can be brought back on-line in less than an hour, rather than the several days which can be needed for older systems.