Project with massive number of analog inputs

I have installed a few data acquisition systems that were just monitoring temperature, humidity etc with alarms but they did not have much on the control side other than alarms and nice graphics... they were standalone systems, its was a medical building and they did not want a PC running a HMI/SCADA

Has your customer done it in the past? if yes ask if you can go and see one of their systems

No, customer has not been collecting data of any kind, up to this point. That is why he called me in. The only reason I was called in is because he is a friend of mine. He knows me and my work. I tried to dissuade him and have him find someone that has done this before but........
 
No, customer has not been collecting data of any kind, up to this point. That is why he called me in. The only reason I was called in is because he is a friend of mine. He knows me and my work. I tried to dissuade him and have him find someone that has done this before but........

As far as manufacturer goes, perhaps tell him, "Hey man, you asked me because you trust my work, so I need some vendor freedom on the solution."

With something like this you are going to need some massive processing power coupled with enterprise-level networking gear and fiber-optics to link between the switches. There are network engineers, database engineers and server engineers involved in something like this.
 
Are we all sure that the analogue inputs are indeed analogue in the sense of 0-10V or 4-20mA as we know them ?

The OP hasn't specified that and as he says he doesn't get told much, was it a comment in passing "we need to pick up 1000000 points" or "we have to pick up 1000000 4-20mA signals" ? There is a massive difference !

We see specs that detail analogue but in fact just mean anything that isn't digital, if it's just 1000000 data points with a refresh of 1 minute then that's well withing the realms of a well designed PLC/SCADA system.

Yes, they are all 4-20mA, or 0-10V, depending on input. It is reading 3 AI's from each panel.
 
As far as manufacturer goes, perhaps tell him, "Hey man, you asked me because you trust my work, so I need some vendor freedom on the solution."

With something like this you are going to need some massive processing power coupled with enterprise-level networking gear and fiber-optics to link between the switches. There are network engineers, database engineers and server engineers involved in something like this.

EXACTLY! 🍺
 
The math still doesn't add up...
200 inverters X 25 panels each X 3 analog inputs per panel = 15,000 inputs. *confused*

If the purpose of collecting the data is view-only live data and/or reporting, you could possibly just dump the readings into a SQL database and retrieve what you need to display using a simple web-based viewing system. This may help reduce the costs and increase flexibility of display and reporting. Also, you could divide the system easily into sub-sections, with each section sending its own data to the database independently of the others. Database queries could be then used to generate the live data and reporting per customer requirements.

Data storage and archival must be well designed for a dataset of this magnitude, in order to achieve reasonable performance and desired archival length.

If you are capturing 15,000 analog data points and dumping them to a database, you would probably need about 20 bytes per database row (2 bytes for analog data, unique ID (bigint): 8 bytes, timestamp: 8 bytes, input type indicator: 2 bytes)
For 15,000 samples, that's 300kB. If you sample once per minute, that's ~13GB per month, and 648 million data rows.

If you are actually capturing 1 million analog data points, you would be generating 20MB of data per minute, or 864GB per month. (43.2 billion database records.)

SQL Server's table length (# of rows) is limited only by disk size, but I'm sure at those numbers it would take some beefy hardware to retrieve any kind of useful subset for reporting purposes. Distributing the dataset across multiple servers may be more viable.

Good luck!
 
Depending on the inverters being used, they may have an Ethernet communication available to view each inverter's data... then no analog inputs required. That would be the best/easiest solution. However, the lack of information from the customer is problematic.

Yes, exactly. I work in the solar industry, and in my experience all inverters deliver monitoring data through a digital interface, typically Modbus RTU or TCP. Some inverters, especially for residential and small-commercial systems, can connect directly to the vendor's monitoring server through the customer's router. For larger systems, inverters typically provide data through a Modbus interface to a specialized data-acquisition unit, which in turn forwards the data (perhaps along with weather data) to a remote server.

Solar monitoring providers include:

Also Energy:
http://www.alsoenergy.com/wp/

Draker:
http://www.drakerenergy.com/

Locus:
http://locusenergy.com/
 
Yes, exactly. I work in the solar industry, and in my experience all inverters deliver monitoring data through a digital interface, typically Modbus RTU or TCP. Some inverters, especially for residential and small-commercial systems, can connect directly to the vendor's monitoring server through the customer's router. For larger systems, inverters typically provide data through a Modbus interface to a specialized data-acquisition unit, which in turn forwards the data (perhaps along with weather data) to a remote server.

Solar monitoring providers include:

Also Energy:
http://www.alsoenergy.com/wp/

Draker:
http://www.drakerenergy.com/

Locus:
http://locusenergy.com/

Good Stuff. Thank you.
 

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