When the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP)
needed a reliable system for boiler and equipment management,
they turned to the DeltaV system from Emerson Process Management.
With an eye on increasing the efficiency of their power production
units and decreasing emissions, the LADWP decided to install
a performance monitoring system at their Haynes Generating
Station, which has six units, including four 230MW gas and
oil fired boilers. The key challenge for this installation
was to find a system that was not only capable of boiler monitoring
and control, but was open enough to gather data and serve
it in real time to a General Physics calculation package.
After evaluating several alternatives, the LADWP selected
Emerson's DeltaV system for its ease of use,
maintainability, advanced control capabilities, and cutting-edge
data integration capability. That cutting-edge data integration
includes the first released product based on the OPC specification.
The DeltaV system has had OPC compatibility since the OPC
Specification Release 1.0 was made available in October 1996.
Following up on the first OPC product in the marketplace,
Emerson worked with General Physics to create the
first working OPC/DCOM implementation.
The Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) is a protocol
that enables software components to communicate directly over
a network in a reliable, secure, and efficient manner. DCOM
has the potential to completely hide the fact that software
applications are running on different computers. Customers
and vendors alike realize significant integration cost savings.
General Physics provided the LADWP with a Windows NT-based
process analysis package, called EtaPROTM, which runs on a
dedicated Windows NT Server box. The DeltaV system is on a
separate Windows NT Workstation PC. Emerson provided General Physics with an OPC toolkit to get them started.
Using the OPC toolkit, General Physics was
able to quickly write the OPC client code in line with the
OPC specification. Once their client was written in line with
the OPC specification, no additional code changes were required
for the client or the server. The OPC Server executable runs
on the DeltaV Integration Station, and whenever the EtaPRO
client on the other machine asks for the information, the
server provides the data across the network connection.
The World's First OPC/DCOM commercial solution.
"We are very happy with the operation of both the DeltaV
and EtaPRO systems. Both OPC and DCOM are transparent to the
user: The EtaPRO system polls the DeltaV and the DeltaV supplies
the requested information. And it transmits several hundred
data points every minute without a hitch.
For the end user, it couldn't be simpler. "We
have had excellent support from both Emerson and
their local representative, Caltrol, Inc, and from General
Physics personnel when setting up the system, and when trouble-shooting
the minor problems that always come up with first installations,"
stated John Holbrook, Operations Supervisor with Los Angeles
Department of Water & Power.
This installation clearly demonstrates the power of OPC and
DCOM to solve customer integration problems painlessly.
Connect your OPC servers FREE with Emerson's
breakthrough OPC
Mirror Lite freeware. OPC is a key technology in the proven
PlantWeb architecture, which changes the economics of process
automation. And the DeltaV system makes it easy.
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