Inductive Automation Blog

Water Authority Leverages Ignition for Faster Processes & Lower Costs

The Arapahoe County Water and Wastewater Authority operates a Collection and Distribution (C/D) system of approximately 30 sites, consisting of waste water lift stations, water wells, storage tanks and booster pump stations serving approximately 3,500 homes and businesses in an eight-square mile area south of Denver, Colorado. The system uses over 30 Rockwell programmable controllers at each site communicating to three Master Terminal Units via serial radios which transmit data across Ethernet radio to a Master PLC, using over 300 message instructions.

Ignition Makes Data from Multiple Sites Available in One Place

Gente Oil’s SCADA system is a centrally managed system of the oil process from extraction to transportation. The SCADA allows users to visualize and interact with the different instrumentation and actuators involved in the process.

Developing Dynamic Material Management in Ignition

Pinnacle Foods Group requested a batch-driven method for ‘kits’ to be created, inventoried, and consumed into the production batch. Every ingredient is required to be traced from the warehouse, to the kit, and into the batch. The material management system includes barcode-based scanning and printing, allergen compatibility control, and dynamic inventory management.

Maximizing Wind Turbine Efficiencies

X-Wind Power Limited is designing 80 kW vertical axis wind turbines and when deployed there will be an Ignition cloud-based SCADA system for data collection, data storage, and visualization. As part of the turbine design process, a recording, visual, dynamic mathematical model of the turbines’ “aero to electrical output” and safety systems was required and this has successfully been achieved using National Instruments’ LabVIEW. The control system engineer said he I couldn’t help thinking to himself, “I’m sure I could do that with Ignition,” and that it would help him understand the mechanical dynamics as well as underline to the team just how powerful Ignition would be for the main SCADA system.

Huron Casting Finds New Ways to Share Data

The organization started using Ignition as a more cost-effective way of meeting the air quality data requirements of its state Environmental Protection Agency. This initially amounted to a few pages within a project, around 100 tags, and a couple of clients. It now monitors over 114 Allen-Bradley devices, tracks over 10,700 tags, and has 130-plus current active clients with an expected expansion to over 300 clients by year-end.

ILS Provides Multi-Layered Solution for Lab Data

ILS Automation serves laboratories that perform many experiments to develop and understand biological processes. The goal of these experiments varies but usually involves optimizing strain and operating conditions to increase yield. In addition, some product may be extracted for downstream process development, such as separation. Also, batch data is slightly different than a continuous process in that the absolute time is not as important as batch age, where batch age usually starts after inoculation. Several real-time or historical batches are compared simultaneously.

IPG Sentinel Module Identifies Ways to Improve OEE

The project consisted of providing a real-time performance system to measure the OEE and identify improvement opportunities for each area of the factory floor.