ENVIRONMENTAL AND SAFETY CRISIS: NEW INDUSTRIAL COMPUTING CAN HELP
By Fred A. Putnam
The pressure Is on—During the past year, we have been shocked by the occurrence of a much higher rate of chemical plant explosions than is usual for industry. We've heard that the number of serious accidents during the past year is greater than in the five past years combined! In addition, the magnihide of Earth Day this year and the follow-on activity from it have been, it seems to me, much greater than in the past. There's no doubt about it — as world population continues to grow, pressure on the environment continually increases, and that pressure has never been higher than right now.
At the same time as we are experiencing increased pressure to do a better job of preserving our environment and increasing safety, the cost of energy is increasing sharply. We must recognize that this cost is closely linked to the environmental and safety crises. In New Hampshire, the Seabrook nuclear power plant has just finally started operating at full power, but the cost overruns have been enormous mainly due to environmental and safety concerns, Add (1) the sharp increase in the price of oil due to the political fallout of its limited supply in the Persian Gulf, (2) the threat of economic downturns and (3) heightened competition worldwide, and it becomes crystal clear that the pressure is on industry today as never before.
The pressure is on to do what? Well, we have to make our plants safer and lessen their impact on the environment and make them more energy efficient and decrease costs and increase quality — all at the same time. Wow! This is a tall order. We are going to have to do many things very differently than we have been doing them.
New Industrial Computing Technologies Can Help-Luckily at the same time all the above requirements are accumulating, a revolution is occurring in industrial computing. Standards-based open architecture systems are skyrocketing down in price and up in functionality, all at the same time. Driven by the momentum of the microelectronics revolution, PCs, PLCs, workstations, networks, and software are advancing in performance/price at an amazing clip. The pace of change is so fast that sometimes it seems like the single greatest factor deterring their widespread adoption within industry is the future shock experienced by the engineering and end-user community.
The new technologies in industrial computing are here today, and they have reached the point where they can be adopted widely to address the critical environmental and safety problems we face. How? They can do this by allowing us to install more and better monitoring and control systems. More monitoring can help to pinpoint before they ever get close to the hazardous operating range. It can also stop plants from operating under conditions which lead to the emission of excessive pollutants. Today, PC and workstation-based process monitoring systems are available at well under $10,000 for a complete system! This should allow plants to install many of these, scattered throughout their operations wherever process or equipment operations can be measured in a way that will provide that extra margin of safety. These systems can be tied into existing data highways in many cases.
Linked with today's low cost standard networks like ethernet, these monitoring stations can form a distributed system. This system can report back to operators to provide centralized monitoring or even be programmed to trigger shutdowns,
Fault Tolerant systems now available at low cast—While we are installing more, we must not forget that we also have to increase reliability and safety. Here, we are aided by the fact that integration of systems onto ever-larger chips decreases interconnects and, which in turn increases reliability. Also, standard iPCs (industrial PCs) and PLCs can now be paired together in hot backup, fault tolerant configurations. Since these are based on pairs of standard components, they are drastically lower in cost than traditional fault tolerant systems, which had to be designed from the ground up with custom, low volume (and hence high cost) components. The result is that these new hot backup systems can be configured for less than old-technology systems without hot backup.
We have to do more with len—in order to increase quality and lower costs and energy consumption. We can do this by making use of this low cost technology to install control systems where they just haven't been economical to install before, in conjunction with monitoring and historical data logging. Also, we have to continually refine our process control systems, and fine tune them to the current prices of energy and raw materials. This requires the ability to install new systems faster. Here, the new software technology of graphical icon-based systems for systems designers can help.
A call to action—I would like to have those interested in applying new industrial computing technology to environmental and safety concerns contact me personally, write letters to Industrial Computers or make contact with groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. This will hopefully stimulate discussion on this subject, and help translate the microelectronics technology revolution into real solutions to these crises facing our world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Frederick A. Putnam is a Ph.D. and M.S. in chemical engineering and BA. in physics. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon Case Westen Reserve, and Dartmouth He is president of LAB TECH and is a widely published author.
home | about us | products | services | support | seminars | library | links