Articles and News

By Shan Zhan, ABB Control Technologies In summer 2017, 15 EU states, Switzerland and Hong Kong were affected by the Fipronil contamination scandal. This article looks at what the scandal can teach food manufacturers about the importance of traceability processes.

At a time when detecting large industrial pipeline leaks within the same day was challenging, new technology that could detect small leaks and any leak quickly was exciting.

From a controls perspective, the three-pod design meant a complex system was required. The challenge was developing a system to manage the production interfaces alongside all of the sequencing, interlocking, etc. that is required between each of the pods.

ECT was tasked with developing a turbomachinery control system for two trains, each with three parallel compressors. Because the operations will be expected to run continuously for years at a time, a redundant architecture was essential to ensure a backup system would take over and reduce the likelihood of downtime should a failure occur.

The methods taught in the course are based on the IEC 62443-4-1 and IEC 62443-4-2 standards, which represent the expertise of a large group of global experts to reduce cyber vulnerabilities by laying a solid foundation of cyber defense mechanisms for automation system networks.