Case Study: PowerData, Caribbean

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Caribbean resort facilities and power stations use DataHub to monitor system output and performance

Even on the lush tropical beaches of St. Maarten, Suriname, St. Kitts, and Antigua, where the sunshine sparkles on the deep turquoise waters of the Caribbean, access to real-time data is vital. While tourists lounge on white sand beaches, the managers and engineers at resorts, shopping centers, and power plants work round the clock behind the scenes to ensure a smooth experience. Operators and managers in the public institutions and private facilities at these remote destinations need to know what their processes are doing at any given time, from any location. They must be able to react quickly to changing conditions and make key decisions.

To meet this need, PowerData Limited of St. Maarten provides real-time and historical online data reporting services. They supply managers and engineers in power plants, resorts, and commercial facilities in the Caribbean islands with the data they need to monitor their power generation equipment, instrumentation, and other machinery. Recently, PowerData started using the DataHub® to give their customers a real-time data display using a standard web browser.

“Now our clients can open a web browser from wherever they are, and see exactly what is going on,” said Mr. Cameron Burn, CEO of PowerData. “The DataHub’s Java applets lets us feed large quantities of data to a page at high speeds, with no refresh necessary.”

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Cameron is using the DataHub’s Table applet to display multiple DataHub points. His web server provides the page, and loads the DataHub Table applet. The applet then creates a direct TCP link to the DataHub, which is connected to the PowerData monitoring equipment’s OPC server. The DataHub streams the data from the PowerData equipment to the web page in real time. The processing load on the web browser is very little-there’s no need for screen refresh-and the data is always up-to-the-second accurate.

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“Remote monitoring of our engine installations has been one of the most valuable aspects of this new system,” said Mr. Jeff Close, MAN Support Services Engineer at Needsmust Electricity Power Station in St. Kitts. “This is so much easier, and much more reliable, than the manual monitoring and logging methods we were using in the past. It gives us the ability to combine all engine data for the station into one page, therefore making it easier to assess the station status.”

“We are very pleased with the convenience of obtaining our data reading automatically from the PowerData web site,” said Terrence Simmon, Power Station Operations Manager of the Sonesta Maho Beach Hotel in St. Maarten. “It has increased our reliability significantly.”

As the benefits of real-time data monitoring from a web browser become more apparent, Cameron Burn expects to see a growing demand for this use of the DataHub.

Case Study: Biomass Biotechnology Bio, Japan

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Monitoring Nature’s Wonder Workers
Biomass Biotechnology Bio logo

Finally, someone has found a good use for pesky flies—let them eat manure! The BBB company (Biomass Biotechnology Bio) in the Chiba prefecture near Tokyo, Japan, has developed a technology that uses fly larvae to convert manure from pigs and other farm animals into organic fertilizer and high-protein fish food. And they are using the Cogent DataHub running on a cloud server to provide real-time monitoring of their production powerhouse—swarms of flies.

The process is quite simple. BBB keeps thousands of specially bred flies in captivity, collects their eggs, and sells them to local pork farmers. The farmers put the fly eggs on their pig manure, and when they hatch, the fly larvae feed off the manure. Enzymes in the larvae saliva break down the manure into rich, organic fertilizer, doing the job in one week that normally takes up to four months using conventional composting techniques. When the larvae are finished, they don’t need to be separated from the finished fertilizer—they crawl out by themselves, seeking a dry environment. At this point, before they can turn into flies, the larvae are collected, dried, and processed as fish food.

There is an English-language video of the whole BBB process which was produced by the Japanese news agency NHK and is available for viewing on the Internet.

The benefits of producing fertilizer from waste material this way are substantial, but until recently costs have been high. The company plans to expand their services to large numbers of farms, and to do so they need an inexpensive, automated way to monitor their production environment. Unlike most of us who use window screens to keep flies out, BBB has special screened rooms to keep flies in. To ensure the flies stay healthy and lay large numbers of eggs, the air temperature and humidity in these rooms must be maintained at optimal levels, and monitored around the clock.

To automate the monitoring, Cogent and their partner, Nissin Systems Co. Ltd of Kyoto Japan, provided a real-time, cloud-based system using the Cogent DataHub® and WebView™. At the BBB facility they installed a Wi-Fi-enabled environmental sensor module from TOA Musendenki to measure the temperature and humidity, and connected it directly to a Cogent DataHub running on a cloud server. Using WebView, they then created a monitoring page to track key environmental variables such as temperature and humidity in the flies’ living quarters.

“Monitoring our system on the web is very convenient,” said Mr. Yamaguchi, President of BBB. “We have been able to reduce our costs significantly, which will be even more important as we expand our operation.”

Case Study: RWTH Aachen University, Germany

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Closed-Loop Control of Weaving Machines using the Cogent DataHub

From ancient times people have been using looms to weave cloth, canvas, and carpets. As the centuries passed, weaving became one of the first tasks to be mechanized in the industrial revolution. The various repetitive tasks such as raising and lowering rows of threads (the warp), and passing a shuttle with the cross-thread (the weft) back and forth between them, were a good fit for simple machines. Today, high-speed air-jet weaving machines are fully automated, and capable of sending a warp thread between weft strands at a rate of 2000 times per minute.

One of the challenges of automating a weaving machine is maintaining proper tension on the threads. With each pass of the weft, a certain amount of tautness must be applied to the warp to keep the woven fabric uniform at all times. Early looms used the weaver’s body weight or hanging stones to keep the warp taut, but an air-jet machine needs a more sophisticated technology.

This challenge has been addressed by the students and faculty of the Institut für Textiltechnik (ITA) der RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany, who are investigating how to optimize the tension of warp threads in an air-jet weaving machine.

“Our main research goal is self-optimization of the warp tension,” said Dr. Ing. Yves-Simon Gloy, Research Manager at ITA, “to enable the loom to set the warp tension automatically at a minimum level without reducing the process stability.” Keeping the proper tension maximizes the speed of the process, while yielding the highest possible quality of fabric.

“We started by creating an automated sequence routine, with the help of regression models for a model-based setting of the loom, and implemented in the weaving process,” said Dr. Gloy. “The automated sequence routine was implemented using the ibaPADU-S-IT as a fast, stand-alone control system and the software ibalogic from iba AG in Fürth, Germany.”

Once the necessary hardware was in place, the team needed to choose a way to monitor and control the loom. They got in touch with Logic Park, in Heimberg, Switzerland, who recommended the Cogent DataHub® as the ideal solution. Connecting the DataHub to the iba System OPC server, Dr. Gloy and his team were able to use WebView™ to quickly build a web HMI.

“The DataHub was the perfect tool to develop the new HMI – easy to install, easy to handle. I got very fast results and the control of the loom via the web browsers is totally stable,” said Dr. Gloy. “Our students are very impressed by the DataHub and its functionality. We can even view the HMI on a tablet, which is beyond state-of-the-art for a textile machine. Now we are investigating new applications for other textile machines in our Institute.”