At a recent Safety Users Group press conference Emerson Process Management announced that it now has in excess of one hundred PlantWeb® smart SIS safety management architecture installations in operation in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Operating in the Refining, Chemical and Offshore industries, as well as on FPSO’s (Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessels), the installations have been successfully proven in various operating environments, from extremely low temperature applications through to desert conditions.

HIMA automated an existing combustion plant at the Ludwigshafen production site belonging to BASF Aktiengesellschaft (in the Rheinland-Pfalz region of Germany). In their solution, the entire automation system for the burner is integrated into the safety system. The standardised BMS application (BMS = Burner Management System) incorporating TÜV-approved function blocks simplifies the programming of the system and makes it easier for the chemical company to convert other burner control systems in the future.

Citect has supplied a 50,000-point CitectSCADA system to Yorkshire Electrical Distribution Limited (YEDL) for remote control and monitoring of hundreds of remote sub stations in the West and South Yorkshire area. The Citect control system employs remote RTUs communicating to two central servers using Citect’s free-of charge DNP3 driver, which has been specially expanded by Citect to accommodate around 1000 remote sites.

Rockwell Automation offers increased power, speed and expanded communication capabilities with new enhancements to the Allen Bradley MicroLogix 1100 family of industrial controllers. The controllers meet the needs of various applications across a multitude of industries, with control, communication and visualization in one compact system.

The new Simatic Thin Clients from Siemens Automation and Drives (A&D) are used as compact terminals for the visualization and input of data. The thin clients are connected over Ethernet with a server on which the application software for human machine interfacing runs. The rugged, hard-disk-free and fan-free devices in degree of protection IP 54 are suitable for all applications with more than one operator station. They are available in 10" and 15" TFT display versions with 64K colors and touch screen operation.