Thursday, October 15, 2009

SCADA: An Overview and Important Facts

By Shane Winson

Scada means Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. Programs coded in Scada are used for controlling various industrial processes and complex equipments. There are various scada systems in use today. These are called MMI or man machine interfaces.

SCADA programs are run on computers and are used to control various devices from there. Many techniques are used to link to the devices that have to be controlled. These include Ethernet, modems and radio links. Sensors are used to access data about various devices in a plant or industrial location.

Due to the usage of diverse systems, many converters are employed for signal conversion for compatibility between various communication links. A central unit can control and monitor all the information received by various communication links.

A central database is maintained. Various parameters of the SCADA controlled instruments can be accessed and these can also be changed if there is a read / write permission for a device. So the central database and master unit help control various parameters of instruments.

There can be analogue or digital parameters. These parameters are regularly accessed by SCADA and stored in this database. Then the program can compute the results based on those values stored in its database.

Then the results obtained after making calculations are interpreted graphically. These are then shown on the computer screen as bars and charts. All this helps SCADA maintain its supervisory control easily.

There can be graphs and bars showing various details about instruments like temperature, liquid level, pressure, etc. All these graphical details are based upon real time computation done by analyzing various parameters.

Additional software modules are available that will let you email or SMS yourself whenever a parameter passes a certain value. Thus SCADA systems can help maintain large scale plants having complex equipments. - 22787

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