A “significant equipment failure” at an electric substation in West Miami-Dade County Tuesday afternoon caused a nearby nuclear reactor to shutdown, triggering waves of power outages from Key West as far north as Daytona Beach and Tampa.

“We don’t know whether the grid disturbance caused the units to shut down or that their shut down caused the grid disturbance,” said Kenneth Clark, a spokesman at the NRC regional office in Atlanta. He said the two reactors were automatically shut down.

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Our Intellect system can be configured to answer that question, immediately, in real-time.

As we advance what we now call our “Intelligent Maintenance Assessment System” (IMAS), we encountered another example where AMPLE warning of an impending catastrophic failure was given. As you can see in the graphic, the system’s “Critical Variable” (purple) was operating seemingly normal and our failure predictor virtual sensor (aqua) was tracking at a low level. About 3/4ths of the way through the graphic you can see that the failure detector clearly jumped to a higher level, indicating a problem, even though the system still seemed normal to the human eye. Quite some time later the system experienced the actual failure.

Click for larger image

This long-time-in-advance notice can be used to perform “just in time” maintenance, take preventative/restorative action, do a graceful shut-down to avoid system damage or other remedial or recovery action.

Priceless.

Existing Intellect customers can achieve the same forewarning. Contact us to find out how.

Lately we’ve been working on an Intellect-based tool / system for monitoring conditions of “devices”. Such devices could be turbines, production lines, unit operations, most anything.

The objective of this work is first to give an indication that the “device” has experienced problems or abuse recently so maintenance can be done. Second, it will be on-line while the unit is operating so that corrective and protective actions can be taken to avoid loss or damage.

We have some of these detection capabilities already in our Anomaly product and the system we’re working on is partly based on Anomaly for finding when things are abnormal. Anomaly isn’t yet predictive, and it really isn’t an Operator tool, so that’s a part of what is being done.

Seeing catastrophic faults before-hand is very difficult, so we developed a technique we thought should be useful. It is. Below you see a picture of an indicator of a device’s behavioral conformance to expectations. Everything is going just fine but then we see this conformance fall apart *before* a catastrophic electrical fault occurs. To see an acute failure develop is priceless, as we can take corrective action to minimize the impact of the failure, such as shutting down gracefully.

And that can be worth Millions…

Click for a larger image

Data is the raw materials for Intellect’s “information manufacturing” and as such, we added support for yet another data historian in the last few days; GE/FANUC’s “Historian”. It was pretty effortless to support. It seems to work very well, either locally or remotely. We downloaded the free historian 25 tag system from the GE site and installed it on an XP box. On our first attempt we connected from a Vista development workstation, created and deleted tags, and wrote and read back values. We then wrapped their calls with an Intellect “DataStore” object and automatically it is available anywhere within Intellect 3.0.

Spiffy.

For our convenience and to help communicate, manufacturing information systems are frequently graphically depicted in functional layers or pyramids, sometimes concentric circles, and such.  Here is a layered diagram that is probably similar to others…

Our products make up the block: “Product Performance Management” which sits over materials, process and quality.  To properly manage product performance, you must have knowledge, understanding and control of these three key elements… 

Materials
You can’t make tasty cookies out of concrete.  The performance of your products starts here.  Materials testing and quantification of key materials attributes are critical to making good products, and unless you live in a perfect world, your materials are not perfect and you will need to make some process adjustments to keep your products within tight quality standards.  Specify, order, select, combine and tune your materials for best performance.  We can help.

Process
Understanding how your process conditions affect product performance is obviously important, but those relationships may not be quite what you think.  Like in cookies again, too hot or too cool an oven will give you bad results.  In-between there is an optimum, which is probably driven by materials, the amount of materials, the nature of the product (crispy?  soft?) that you are making and other factors.

Quality
Of course, “quality control” generally is a misnomer, because it is usually product performance testing and feedback.  The control really comes on the materials and process side, as any 6-Sigma statistician will confirm.  Focus on improving the materials and process consistency and also move the “quality testing” (product attributes measurements) on-line so your operators receive faster feedback and perhaps you might be able to use it directly in process control.  But we all know that many key product performance attributes must still be measured in the lab.  There’s no cookie-taste sensor that I know of.  This is where our “Virtual Sensors” come in, you *CAN* build a cookie-taste instrument, but more on that another time.

Our software helps you span materials, process and quality by unifying the information into common analytical datasets and helping you through the process of knowledge, understanding and control.

We created the Data Explorer to enable you to load data from text files, Excel Workbooks and now SQLServer (including Industrial SQL from Wonderware).  You can visualize your historical data in trends, histograms and scatter plots (even 3D!).  You can clean it up a wee bit, if you like, because real data is often a bit dirty.

Why?  So you can see …

• if something is trending upward, or down, or not at all, even if the data is very noisy.
• whether your variables move together or opposite.  If you turn Knob A, does Variable B actually go up or down?  By how much?
• if variables have linear, or non-linear relationships… If you turn Knob A up, does Variable B have a limit where it stops moving?  Or even reverses direction?
• how your data is distributed across its range.

To be able to explore and fly through your data… with infinite zoom, scroll and rotate.

>>Read More Here<<
>>Download it Here!<<

She’s pretty too…  And you can’t beat the price:  FREE !

Welcome to our blog!  We’ll be talking about applications, software tips and techniques, from developer coding to achieving product performance enhancements.  We hope that you will come by frequently to see what’s happening and how you can use it to your personal and company benefit!