PROCESS CONTROL

Marina Eskola, Weir Director- Digital Solutions distinct from technologies like Programmable Logic Controllers( PLCs), Distributed Control Systems( DCS) and Mining Execution Systems( MES)? Marina Eskola, Weir Director- Digital Solutions recently answered this question as part of an expert Q & A series published by the company:“ Digital twins are very different from these technologies. To start, I think it’ s worth clarifying what we mean when we talk about digital twins because there’ s a lot of different definitions out there. For Weir, first and foremost, it’ s about having a platform with the capabilities to bring in and integrate data from many different data sources. This includes IoT data, maintenance data, sensor data, processing data, etc. We then combine that with our engineering knowledge and physics-based models and bring all that together to build different digital twins. This is then presented as a digital representation of the product and facilitates modelling, allowing the user to understand the operating extremes.”

She adds:“ These can then be used to meet different business use case requirements – for instance, implementing predictive maintenance schedules. Once

these predictive models have been built, we can then utilise AI and machine learning tools to gain a greater understanding of how individual pieces of equipment are operating. Crucially, AI models are built on good data and, as an OEM, Weir is in the enviable position of having access to all our equipment’ s proprietary data on design, engineering, maintenance, manufacturing and operation. Moreover, we have a global workforce that has experience working with the equipment on-site day-in-day-out. This allows us to build very strong use cases. The goal is to have a library of different predictive models for different equipment that we can then use to predict, say, different types of failure modes.” For more on the Weir NEXT intelligent solutions value proposition, see this month’ s Maintenance article on p. 32.

ABB’ s plant automation ability

ABB Ability System 800xA’ s unparallelled ability to integrate and process information, providing it to the operators a contextualised way, helps plant personnel to make better decisions and reducing human errors. IM caught up with Jerome Rosse, Head of Automation Product Management for Mining, ABB

Q What does ABB Ability 800xA bring to mineral processing in terms of safety?

The ABB Ability System 800xA High Integrity safety system is TÜV certified

Highest Efficiency in the Field for Mining and Monitoring

for SIL3 and was designed with flexible deployments in mind with integrated, separate, or standalone options. It has a feature rich operator interface to adapt to end users’ operations philosophy, helping reduce time to decision and action; with high performance and situation awareness built-in. Superior abnormal situation handling helps prevent incidents before they occur. It allows for symbiotic, ergonomic control room designs focused on operator effectiveness, health, attraction, & retention. Compliance with industry safety standards and cybersecurity features protect both personnel and operations. Its collaboration enablement features like remote operations combined with Camera Connect including image analytics, allow to remove people from hazardous locations while providing an immersive experience to the operator who can be thousands of kilometres away

Q In what ways does it also drive efficiency and asset utilisation?

System 800xA’ s comprehensive, integrated engineering environment allows you to work smarter resulting in reduced project costs, complexity, and time to delivery. A complete decoupling of HW and SW engineering takes automation off the critical path. Automatic loop and alarm checks on multiple smart devices in parallel including report generation save up to 90 % in loop commissioning man-hours for smart devices.

• supports sporadic, periodic, or 24 / 7 monitoring

• automatic scan alignment and intelligent filtering for reliable results

• define multiple monitoring zones with individual scan schedules

• automated alerts with real-time notifications

• support of automatic prism monitoring

• results available via any web browser

• integration-ready with local or cloud infrastructure

NEW

Explore RIEGL ´ s Monitoring Apps

www. riegl. com

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