SCADA Control System
Authors :- Mrunmayee Kulkarni, Neel Madane, Hussain Magar, Prachi Mahajan, Shreyas Mahajan & Neel Malwatkar
Control systems surround us. We use automatic control systems when we drive a car, take milk from the refrigerator, or turn on the heat. Troubleshooting and repair technicians for these systems are in high demand. The control system has three main characteristics: stability, accuracy, and response.
Principles of control system
Control systems integrate elements whose function is to keep a process variable at a specific value or range of values.
The various indicators used to operate an industrial facility are provided by instrumentation. In some cases, operators record these indications for use in the facility’s day-to-day operations. The information recorded assists the operator in evaluating the current state of the system and taking appropriate action if conditions are not as expected.
Requiring the operator to take all necessary corrective actions is impractical, if not impossible, especially when a large number of indicators must be monitored. As a result, once operating under normal conditions, most systems are controlled automatically. Automatic controls significantly reduce the operator’s workload and make their job more manageable.
Process variables that must be controlled in a system include, but are not limited to, flow, level, temperature, and pressure. Some systems do not require that all of their process variables be controlled. Consider the central heating system. A basic heating system is temperature-based and ignores the rest of the house’s atmospheric parameters. The thermostat keeps track of the house’s temperature. When the temperature falls below the value set by the house’s occupants, the system kicks in to raise the temperature. When the temperature reaches the set point, the system turns off.
Automatic control systems neither replace nor relieve the operator of the responsibility for facility maintenance. The operation of the control systems is verified on a regular basis. If a control system fails, the operator must be able to take over and control the process manually. In most cases, understanding how the control system works assists the operator in determining if the system is operating properly and what actions are required to keep the system safe. This blog will concentrate on one control system, SCADA.
SCADA
SCADA is an acronym that stands for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. It combines software and hardware components to increase efficiency in industrial organizations. Organizations can efficiently collect and evaluate industrial data using SCADA systems, allowing them to make the right business decisions at the right time..
SCADA assists organizations in monitoring, processing, and archiving real-time data. It also allows you to control industrial and energy processes both locally and remotely. It provides the organization’s authorized personnel with a detailed and real-time overview of all industrial and energy processes. SCADA also allows them to interact with and change the settings of individual elements of industrial and energy processes. The ability to change the settings of industrial and energy elements and see the changes in real time makes the manufacturing process much more flexible, efficient, and, in some cases, environmentally friendly. SCADA’s advantages make it uniquely suited for industrial and energy processes that must run continuously with no downtime.
SCADA provides a global view and universal control over a wide range of industrial and energy sectors. Human-Machine Interface is required to efficiently present the processed industrial information. SCADA systems include their own HMI and optimized tools for effective and customized UI.
WHY SCADA?
SCADA architecture begins with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or remote terminal units (RTUs).
Both microcomputers communicate with a variety of objects such as HMIs, sensors, end devices, and factory machines, and then route the data extracted from those objects to computers running SCADA software. As a result, SCADA software distributes, processes, and displays data before assisting operators and other employees in analyzing the data and making decisions. Some of the most important reasons are listed below:
Modern Technology
Increased Flexibility
Database Friendly
True-Real Time analytics
Rapid installation & Development
Platform Independent
Unlimited Licensing
APPLICATIONS
The system is a crucial component of several different industries. Some examples include:
• Energy manufacturing, transmission, and distribution;
• Renewables;
• Energy, gas, and commodities trading;
• Manufacturing;
• Automotive;
• Oil and gas;
• Water and wastewater;
• Transportation;
• Recycling;
• Food and beverages production.
Data is extremely valuable in all of the industries mentioned, and SCADA systems must operate continuously. Data loss, system crashes and outages, and cyber-attacks pose a critical threat to all organizations that use the system. Cyber-attacks on power grids and the energy sector as a whole have become a serious threat since 2015. All other industries are a popular target for cyber-attacks. SCADA is one of the most critical IT systems for running production for many businesses. Because of this, it is a prime target for attackers. SCADA must provide a high level of security to protect your data and keep it safe from external threats.
• Access management and protection;
• Role definition;
• Configuration protection;
• Secure (encrypted) communications;
• Securely stored data (historian);
• Availability of updates and security patches;
• Support of new (more secure) standards.
Drawbacks
“There hasn’t been any real advancement in SCADA technology for 20 years.”
- Consulting electrical engineer , Georgia ,USA.
- As the system is complex, it requires skilled operators, analysts and programmers to maintain SCADA system
- PLC based SCADA system is complex in terms of hardware units and dependent modules
- Installation costs are higher.
- The system increases unemployment rates.
- The system supports use of restricted software and hardware equipment.
- Controlling remote sites via a web browser can create security concerns. SCADA systems are a network presence and face significant threats and vulnerabilities.
- SCADA systems are currently vital components of most nations’ critical infrastructures. They control pipelines, water and transportation systems, utilities, refineries, chemical plants, and a wide variety of manufacturing operations. Failure of controlled systems can lead to direct loss of life due to equipment failure or indirect losses due to failure of critical infrastructure controlled by SCADA.
- Replacing hardware components is an expensive, unpalatable option for the customer.
How wind turbines alignment to wind direction affects efficiency?
A case study through SCADA data mining.
The study is about SCADA techniques for wind energy. The work deals with the effects on the efficiency of turbine inability of optimal aligning to the wind direction, due to meandering wind caused by wakes.
Experimentation
The present investigation is concerned with the effects of wakes on farm efficiency. Because the presence of rotors alters the wind flow and causes meandering wind, if machines are sited close to one another, when a turbine is downstream, it usually suffers from an inability to optimally align to the rapidly changing wind direction. Misalignment to wind direction is thus a prominent symptom of wake effects, resulting in lower performance.
The analysis of nacelle positions under meteorological regimes producing significant wakes at a test case wind farm in Italy on very gentle terrain. The SCADA control system records nacelle positions as 10-minute averages of a series of frequent samplings: they represent a time discretization, but the range of values they can assume is a continuous set.
The power of the procedure is revealed in the fact that the discretization highlights clustering effects: the greater the presence of wakes, the sharper the behavior of the turbines as a whole.
Analysis performed on the test case of a wind farm
The wind farm layout is depicted in following figure, where the elementary grain is 50 meters. The machines have a rated power of 2 MW, a rotor diameter of 82 meters, and a hub height of 80 meters. The farm was chosen because the inter-turbine distance is such that significant wake interactions occur when moderately strong winds blow from West to South.
The Approach and The Results
Data set construction for selecting a sub cluster of turbines for analysis Filtering data based on meteorological conditions:
Wind speed less than 10 m/s, keeping in mind that our ultimate goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of the orientation of the clusters of turbines T57-T60.
Based on the collected parameters and subscripts ranging from 1 to 4, we arrive at the following formula for wind turbine efficiency:
ε =ΣPi / (4Pmax )
The final filtering was used to make the following analysis more consistent, based on the information contained in the nacelle positions, which is used to evaluate the optimal configurations.
The final task is to quantify whether or not the dominant patterns of the sub cluster are favorable. This will aid in determining the quality of turbine alignment to wind direction and may provide interesting indications for the perspective of jaw active control systems, as all efficiency measurements passing through the filters have been averaged, and the average efficiency has been computed separately for each subset corresponding to a cluster configuration. The filtering procedure produced a data set with anemometer wind direction very focused on 270°. (255°, 249°, 258°, 261°) is the best orientation vector, where the first component represents turbine T57, and so on.
Conclusion
It would also be valuable to simulate orientation patterns through CFD techniques and compare predicted performances against operational data.
In this way post-processing methods on the SCADA data of a test case wind farm effects on power output quality of wind turbine alignment to wind direction have been analyzed through post-processing methods on the SCADA data of a test case wind farm sited in southern Italy on a gentle terrain .