Since DMC opened an office in Houston this year, the conference was a perfect opportunity to meet more people in the area. Jason Mayes and I attended and had a great time connecting with partners and distributors. We attended a presentation every session and found the conference to be an insightful introduction to the area.

I had the privilege of delivering a presentation titled Improving and Scaling SCADA Systems: Is WinCC OA Right for Me? The presentation covered a case study from a DMC distributed architecture project that was a good use case for WinCC OA. For our project, we did this with generators. The presentation paralleled these features as they would apply to similar features within Oil & Gas. I shared how our WinCC OA application might apply to distributed well sites, frack site trucks and skids, and pipelines. 

View the slide deck from my presentation below and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Learn more about DMC's Oil and Gas Engineering services.

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Formerly known as WinCC Professionals, WinCC Specialists are SCADA experts when it comes to SIMATIC WinCC. DMC engineers have extensive experience with WinCC, WinCC 7 and WinCC OA among other Siemens platforms.

Learn more about DMC’s WinCC and WinCC OA services.

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WinCC OA is similar to a traditional SCADA system, but with a host of additional benefits. Due to its use of object oriented concepts and the ease at which it scales as your system expands, WinCC OA is an optimal solution for geographically distributed oil and gas applications. Throughout the course of the presentation, I will build upon solutions and concepts that DMC has already created to detail the many advantages and use cases for WinCC OA in oil and gas applications.

The Siemens Oil & Gas Innovations Conference aims to address issues, challenges, emerging technologies and new industry trends in the Oil &Gas Industry. Among other benefits, participants will be exposed to engineering and automation solutions to increase productivity.

Don’t miss my presentation Improving and Scaling SCADA Systems: Is WinCC OA Right for Me? during the Solution Breakouts at1:30pm in the Sunshine Special room.

Learn more about DMC's WinCC Open Architecture services.

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Using the shaftless drive technology requires the use of a motion controller to command the system. Siemens Industry and Automation’s motion control platform, SiMotion, is a powerful and flexible platform that can be used for such a purpose. The SiMotion software package allows the programmer to configure all of the drives and axes with great flexibility and detail and gives the capability to program in three different languages: text-based, ladder or function block diagram (FBD), and in a motion chart.

A typical approach to programming a shaftless drive solution would be to do any math required in the text-based portion, any peripheral I/O control and basic sequence logic would be done in ladder, and all of the motion commands to control the axes/drives would be programmed in the Motion Charts. The Motion Chart section would contain all of the individual motion commands to control the axes from enabling and disabling, to moving to a position, to gearing.

Since most of the shaftless drive solutions follow the same control strategy, Siemens has created the “SiMotion Shaftless Drive Standard”. This Standard outlines a programming structure and contains a library of functions that work well to control such solutions. The basic ideas contained in this strategy are outlined below:

• All of the tasks such as basic logic processing are done in the cyclical background tasks and all of the motion tasks are done in the a-cyclical Motion Tasks.
  • The standard supplies a pre-written Motion Task for each axis specific to the tasks of line-shaft replacement system.
  • Control of each axis is performed through a standard mode interface.
• A set of typical axis modes are defined and the motion tasks are almost entirely performed simply by assigning a mode to the axis.
• The interface parameters affect the axis behavior in each mode.

In a recent project, I implemented the SiMotion Shaftless Drive Standard for a printing application- a rotary cutter positioned at the end of a printing press. This application contains the basic components that allow for easy implementation of the standard. There are three rotary axes on the rotary cutter that are geared during operation to follow an encoder on the press. A “knife setup” routine allows the operator to step through several configurable positions on the knife axis. The implementation of the Shaftless Standard contains the following components:

• A Virtual Master axis follows the press encoder.
• The program contains three real following axes which follow the Virtual Master.
• Each axes has its own Motion Task consisting of a call to the Standard’s axis function block.

Using the Shaftless Standard gives several advantages:

• In order to gear each of the real axes to the virtual master, we simply need to set the axes in “Gear Mode” and the Standard takes care of the individual motion commands.
• The knife setup routine requires that we put the knife axis in “positioning mode”. Then the program just changes the position set point for each new position, and the axis moves to that position.
• Since we use a setup that is a standard recognized by Siemens, the system is easily supported by Siemens world-wide network of application engineers.
• Once a programmer is comfortable designing systems following the Shaftless Standard, program creation and debug times are shortened.

The SiMotion Shaftless Drive Standard is available to qualified end-users and Automation Solution Providers, such as DMC through your local Siemens Application Engineer.

You can read more about the Rotary Cutter project in our case studies.

Learn more about DMC’s Siemens SiMotion programming services.

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Check out these Case Study entries to read more detail!

Sharepoint Timesheet Entry Portal

Battery Management System (BMS) Validation Test Stand

Battery Pack Monitor System for Environmental Testing

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If you are simply adding items to the end of a flat data block (not adding items to a user-defined type (udt) within the data block, for example) then to retain the values of the data block follow these quick steps.

1. Go online with all of the blocks in Simatic Manager.
2. Copy the online version of the data block whose values you would like to retain into your offline project.
3. Add the items to end of the data block
4. Download – your values will be retained.

If you need to make a more complicated change to the data block such as adding items to a udt used with the data block, a few more steps are needed. Even if you have first saved a copy of your online values prior to making the change, the values will be lost after you save the change. Therefore, follow these extra steps.

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 above.
2. Open the data block and Generate Source for the data block. File -> Generate Source. This will save a version of your data block and the values in a file in the Sources folder.
3. Make all changes that you need to the data block then Save and Close the data block.
4. Open the Source file you created and compile it. This will set all values in the data block equal to the values you see in the Source file.
5. Download – your values have been retained.

Learn more about DMC’s expertise in Siemens S7 PLC programming.

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The machine we are currently working on is a new Sheeter which runs on Siemens’ SIMOTION platform. Kevin is intimately familiar with the functionality of the existing Sheeters and he has solid knowledge of the existing code base.

In order to be most efficient and provide the most cost-effective solution for ILF, Kevin and I worked side by side to add the required new features and improve the organization, reusability, stability, troubleshooting features, and ultimately the performance of their existing Sheeter code.

Ken Brey (DMC) also joined us for a day and we had a great time putting our old trigonometry and geometry skills to use to come up with a system of equations for the velocity of a scissor lift. Some of us even took up Frank on his dare to eat chocolate-covered grasshoppers! It was exciting for us to give Kevin an inside look at the daily activities at the DMC office.

The week was a success and we look forward to continuing our relationship with ILF!

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