ASP / ENGINEERING DESK
Technical articles, PDF guides and practical tools for plant, maintenance and project teams planning automation investments.
Control Systems
A distributed control system (DCS) brings controllers, network, servers and operator stations together on one engineering platform for continuous process plants. Layers, components and selection criteria.
Control Systems
The choice between PLC and DCS depends less on plant size than on process type, redundancy needs, engineering model and lifecycle expectations. Decision table and hybrid options.
Control Systems
Most unplanned stops do not come from nowhere; they grow out of small degradations nobody noticed. An annual health-check list for DCS and PLC systems, from controller load to restore tests.
Control Systems
Virtualization reduces server count and speeds up recovery, but badly designed it creates new single points of failure. Design principles for vendor support, storage, redundancy and time synchronization.
Control Systems
Vendor support and remote intervention are unavoidable, but an uncontrolled VPN opens up the whole plant. Designing remote access with a DMZ, jump host, multi-factor authentication, time-boxed access and session recording.
Control Systems
Geothermal plant automation carries challenges unlike a conventional power plant: corrosive fluid, scaling, remote wellfields and gas safety. Architecture and design notes from wellhead to turbine.
Control Systems
A good control panel is judged not on its first day of operation but on the first day it is maintained. A design guide to standards, heat, layout, segregation, labelling, documentation and factory testing.
Control Systems
Moving a long-serving Advant Master system to 800xA is less a product change than a risk-management exercise. A roadmap through inventory, strategy choice, FAT and a short-shutdown cut-over.
Control Systems
A DCS investment involves more than selecting controllers and software. Operations, maintenance and project teams need a shared definition of scope so that proposals can be compared and…
Control Systems
Acceptance testing should not be a formality at the end of a project. FAT and SAT answer different questions in different conditions; write the test plan early, tie evidence to records and close open items traceably.
Control Systems
An I/O list is the shared language between field equipment and control software. Missing units, ambiguous signal types or duplicate tags can propagate from panel design to operator…
Control Systems
The existence of a backup file does not prove a system can be restored within the required time. Recovery needs project files, versions, licenses, access arrangements and suitable hardware…
