Drax speeds repairs with ProcessVue alarm management 23 May 2012

Engineers at Drax power station, in Selby, north Yorkshire, say they can identify alarm trends faster and more easily – and analyse the causes – since implementing MAC Solutions' ProcessVue alarm management system.

"Introducing ProcessVue to the power station has been a gradual process over the last year or so," explains George Eccleston, lead control and instrumentation engineer at Drax.

"We have 11 SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] systems across site. Six of these look after the six steam turbine generators, two are associated with water treatment and common site services, and the remaining three are within our materials handling processes," he adds.

All now provide plant operators with real-time alarm handling capability.

"ProcessVue has been absolutely critical in helping us to quickly identify the sequence of events that lead up to a plant upset or loss of production. By adapting ProcessVue to our requirements, MAC Solutions has also helped to de-skill our alarm management processes, so that our front-end users can access the information they require quickly and easily."

He explains that Drax power station runs on five different DCSs (distributed control systems) linked to eight SCADA systems, which handle all process data and more than 70,000 alarms.

"Prior to implementing ProcessVue, the alarms coming from our SCADA system were very detailed and did not offer a concise message to our process engineers. We wanted software that would better manage the structure of the alarm message by parsing it and then sending the new, reconstructed message out to our SOE web clients," states Eccleston.

"It is critical that our IT systems enable us to access process data and alarms quickly and easily. We have literally thousands of events each day that need to be recorded, as well as safety-critical processes that need monitoring and managing in terms of process alarms," he says.

"If the plant has a trip on a safety-critical system, such as the level monitoring of boiler water, this needs to be recorded for audit and reporting purposes. All safety-critical processes at Selby are monitored and recorded using ProcessVue."

And he adds: "ProcessVue can be interrogated to give all alarm occurrences between, say, 01.00 and 02.00 on that day, and then analyse the results... Phase One Alarm Management at Drax was all about moving towards a paperless system by installing printer replacement software...

"Phase Two focused on retrieving the data, receiving the alarms and recording this information on a PC-based system. Phase Three is where we are now, with the ability to recognise different types of alarm messages and to sort these into a database using standard Microsoft SQL tools.

"What comes next is moving towards automating these reports and analysing the data."

Brian Tinham

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