Challenges facing energy industry sector.

Leaders from Britain’s  energy industry attended Copa Data’s  zenon Energy Day 2018 at the Thames Valley Microsoft centre. The event, which was held on in April 2018, welcomed industry experts and energy suppliers to address the current challenges the sector is facing — renewable generation, substation automation, IoT and cyber security.

A welcome speech from the British MD od Copa Data , Martyn Williams, started a day encompassed a series of talks from industry experts. Speakers included Ian Banham, IoT Technical Sales Lead UK for Microsoft, Chris Dormer of systems integrator, Capula and Jürgen Resch, Copa Data Energy Industry Manager.

Preparing for renewables
Only 24 per cent of Britain’s electricity comes from renewable sources — a relatively low figure compared to some European countries.  However, the percentage is growing. In 2000, Britain’s renewable capacity was 3,000 MW, and rose eleven-fold by the end of 2016 to 33,000 MW.

To prepare for the impending challenges for this market, Jürgen Resch’s presentation discussed how software can alleviate some of the common questions associated with renewable energy generation, including the growing demand for energy storage.
“Energy storage is often used in combination with renewables because renewable energy is volatile and fluctuating,” explained Resch. “In Korea, the government is pumping $5 billion dollars into energy storage systems. In fact, every new building that is built in Korea gets an energy storage battery fitted into the basement.”

BMW’s battery storage farm in Leipzig (D) was also presented as an example. The facility, which uses COPA-DATA’s zenon as the main control centre system, uses 700 high-capacity used battery packs from BMW i3s and could also provide storage capacity for local wind energy generation.

Moving onto specific issued related to wind generation, Resch discussed the potential challenge of reporting in a sector reliant on unpredictable energy sources.
“Reports are particularly important in the wind power industry,” he said. “Typically, owners of wind farms are investors and they want to see profits. Using software, like zenon Analyzer, operators can generate operational reports.

“These reports range from a basic table with the wind speeds, output of a turbine and its associated profit, or a more sophisticated report with an indication of the turbines performance against specific key performance indicators (KPIs).”

Best practice for substation automation
Following the morning’s keynote speeches on renewable energy, Chris Dormer of Capula, presented the audience with a real-life case study. The speech discussed how smart automation helped to address significant issues related to the critical assets of the National Grid’s substations, where Capula was contracted to refurbish the existing substation control system at New Cross.

“Like a lot of companies that have developed, grown and acquired assets over the years, energy providers tend to end up with a mass mixture of different types of technology, legacy equipment and various ways to handling data,” explained Dormer. “For projects like this, the first key evaluation factor is choosing control software with legacy communication. We need to ensure the software can talk to both old legacy equipment in substations as well as modern protocol communications, whilst also ensuring it was scalable and compliant.

“The National Grid will make large investments into IEC 61850 compatible equipment, therefore for this project, we needed an IEC 61850 solution. Any system we put in, we want to support it for the next 25 years. Everyone is talking about digital substations right now, but there are not that many of them out there. That said, we need to prepare and be ready.”

The case study, which was a collaborative project with COPA-DATA, was recognised at the UK Energy Innovation Awards 2017, where it was awarded the Best Innovation Contributing to Quality and Reliability of Electricity Supply.

“Our collaboration with COPA-DATA allows us to address modern energy challenges,” explained Mark Hardy, Managing Director of Capula upon winning the award last year. “It helps drive through the best value for energy customers.”

Cyber security – benefit or burden?
“Raise your hand if you consider cyber security to be a benefit?” Mark Clemens, Technical Product Manager at Copa Data asked the audience during his keynote speech on cyber security. “Now, raise your hand if you consider it to be a burden?”

Clemens’ question provided interesting results. Numerous attendees kept their hands raised for both questions, giving an insight into the perception of cyber security for those operating in the energy industry — a necessary evil.

“A cyber-attack on our current infrastructure could be easy to execute,” continued Clemens. “95 per cent of communication protocols in automation systems don’t provide any security features. For those that do provide security, the mechanisms are often simply bolted-on.”

Clemens continued to explain how substation design can strengthen the security of these sites. He suggested that, despite living in the era of IoT, energy companies should limit the communication between devices to only those that are necessary. The first step he suggested was to establish a list of assets, including any temporary assets like vendor connections and portable devices.

“There are lots of entry points into a substation, not only through the firewall but through vendors and suppliers too. This doesn’t have to be intentional but could be the result of a mistake. For example, if an engineer is working in the substation and believe they are testing in simulation mode, but they are not, it could cause detrimental problems.”

Collaborating with Microsoft
The address of Microsoft’s UK IoT Technical Sales Lead, Ian Banham focused on the potential of cloud usage for energy companies. When asking attendees who had already invested in cloud usage, or planned on doing so, the audience proved to be a 50:50 split of cloud enthusiasts and sceptics.

“IoT is nothing new,” stated Ian Banham, IoT Technical Sales Lead at Microsoft. “There’s plenty of kit that does IoT that is over 20 years old, it just wasn’t called IoT then. That said, there’s not a great deal of value in simply gathering data, you’ve got to do something with that data to realise the value from it.

“The change in IoT is the way the technology has developed. That’s why we are encouraging our customers to work with companies like COPA-DATA. They have done the hard work for you because they have been through the process before.”

He explained how Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, could be integrated with COPA-DATA’s automation software, zenon. In fact, COPA-DATA’s partnership with Microsoft is award-winning, COPA-DATA having won Microsoft Partner of the Year in the IoT category in 2017.

• • See also Gold Standard in the Cloud! (Feb 2018)

@copadata #PAuto @Azure #Cloud #IoT

On the road with IoT.

How the field service management sector is being changed by IoT

George Walker, managing director Novotek, explains how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing field service. As more companies move to a predictive model of equipment maintenance, they are looking for ways to use connected devices to improve field service.

Before internet-connected devices were the norm, it was common for facilities managers and in-house maintenance staff to spend time on the phone with suppliers booking in a suitable time for repairs to be carried out. It might have taken hours, if not days, for an engineer to come out to the site — leading to potential downtime in the interim.

When the technician came to the site, they may have found that they didn’t have the right tools, the right parts, or even the specific knowledge to carry out the service needed. This would mean the same technician would have to go back, or a second technician would need to come out to complete the service.

Although this model has been the norm for many years, it is no longer feasible in a modern environment. Factors such as first-time fix rates, mean time to repair and overall efficiency are driving businesses to closely monitor resource allocation and the time spent on maintenance.

Field service management has traditionally been responsible for activities such as locating fleet vehicles, scheduling maintenance work-orders and dispatching personnel. However, the advent of the IoT means that much of this model is shifting to real-time, predictive maintenance and those companies that adapt their businesses will benefit the most from the resulting competitive advantage.

The number of connected IoT devices is set to surge in the next few years, going from 27 billion in 2017 to an estimated 125 billion in 2030, according to analysis firm IHS Markit. Sensors can not only help engineers to remotely diagnose problems in many instances, they can also help to remotely repair or prevent further damage to equipment.

However, hardware sensors are just the start. Better software will help businesses to truly realise the potential of IoT in field service management. Modern field servicing software needs to go beyond the basics and offer better wider integration with the company’s inventory, billing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

This is why we’ve partnered with the leading vendor in the industry to help our customers achieve better results. Novotek is the sole distributor of GE’s ServiceMax field servicing software in Britain and Ireland. ServiceMax creates solutions for the people who install, maintain and repair machines across dozens of industries, as the leading provider of complete end-to-end mobile and cloud-based technology.

The results speak for themselves. In a recent survey of ServiceMax customers in March 2018, technicians and engineers were 19 per cent more productive, service costs went down by 9 per cent and service revenue increased by 10 per cent. In addition to this, customers saw contract renewals increase by 11 per cent, mean time-to-repair decrease 13 per cent and equipment uptime improve by 9 per cent — leading to customers being 11 per cent more satisfied. Overall, compliance incidents dropped by 13 per cent.

By sending the right technician to the right job, at the right time, you avoid situations where some technicians are overloaded, while others have white space in their schedules. Using an app that works across devices, technicians can request jobs from anywhere. Each service level agreement (SLA) is easily managed and field service reports are easily produced.

What was science fiction a mere five years ago is now reality. A machine on a customer site can send an alert to the service team warning them of an imminent failure and potential downtime. Technicians can then be proactively dispatched to site with the right parts to carry out urgent repairs and mitigate costly downtime.

IoT has already drastically changed other sectors of the industrial landscape and is now making waves in the field service management sector. Whether you’re a utility business, a healthcare provider or even a telecoms business, it’s about time you looked at how IoT will change field servicing for you.

@Novotek #PAuto #IIoT @StoneJunctionPR

Keep making the tablets!

This article shows how valuable manufacturing production line downtime in the pharmaceutical industry can be reduced by ensuring predictive maintenance of tablet making machinery using Harting’s MICA industrial computing platform.

Introduction
Harting recently challenged postgraduate students from the Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence at Loughborough University to investigate practical application solutions where MICA – the company’s innovative open platform based ruggedised industrial edge computing device – could be applied to the benefit of manufacturing. Simple seamless integration within existing established production processes was the target, based on the concept of machine predictive maintenance.

The key objective was to achieve immediate productivity improvements and return on investment (RoI), thus satisfying the increasing trend for Integrated Industry 4.0 implementation on the factory floor. One such proposal was suggested for volume manufacturers in the pharmaceutical industry: in particular, those companies manufacturing tablets using automated presses and punch tools.

Data from these machines can be collected using passive UHF RFID “on metal” transponders which can be retrofitted to existing tablet press machines and mounted on the actual press-die/punch tools. The RFID read and write tags can record the pressing process, i.e. the number of operations performed by a particular press die, plus any other critical operating sensor-monitored conditions. The system can then review that data against expected normal end-of-life projected limits set for that die.

Such data can be managed and processed through Harting’s MICA edge computing device, which can then automatically alert the machine operator that maintenance needs to take place to replace a particular die-set before it creates a catastrophic tool failure condition and breakdown in the production line – which unfortunately is still quite a common occurrence.

Open system software
MICA is easy to use, with a touch-optimised interface for end users and administrators implemented entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript. It provides an open system software environment that allows developers from both the production and IT worlds to quickly implement and customise projects without any special tools. Applications are executed in their own Linux-based containers, which contain all the necessary libraries and drivers. This means that package dependencies and incompatibilities are eliminated. In addition, such containers run in individual “sandboxes” which isolate and secure different applications from one another with their own separate log-in and IP addresses. As a result, there should be no concerns over data security when MICA is allowed access to a higher-level production ERP network.

MICA is already offered with a number of containers such as Java, Python C/C++, OPC-UA, databases and web toolkits, all available on free download via the HARTING web site. As a result, users should be able to download links to the operating software system compatible with an existing machine, enabling full 2-way communication with the MICA device. Relaying such manufacturing information, which can comprise many gigabytes of data in the course of a day, directly to the ERP would normally overwhelm both the network and the ERP. With the MICA, this data stream is buffered directly onto the machine and can be reduced to just essential business-critical data using proven tools from the IT world.

The resultant improvements in productivity include:

– Less downtime reduces the amount of money lost during unforeseen maintenance of damaged punch tools.
– Individual punch identification will help in removing a specific punch, once it has reached its pre-set operational frequency working limit.
– A digital log of each punch and the number of tablets that it has produced is recorded. This provides vital information for GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) regulators such as the MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) or the FDA (Food & Drug Administration).

A further benefit is that MICA is very compact, with DIN rail mounting fixing options that allow it to be easily accommodated inside a machine’s main control cabinet.

@HARTING #PAuto #Pharma @CDT_EI