Foundation Letter

OPC Foundation Announces IEC Standard for OPC UA; Opens Certification Lab

Thomas Burke, president and executive director of the OPC Foundation, discusses OPC developments, such as collaboration projects for interoperability, the IEC standard for OPC UA, hands-on workshops for OPC users and developers, and highlights of OPC efforts around the world.

Welcome to the August 2010 edition of OPConnect, the official newsletter of the OPC Foundation. I thought this would be a good opportunity to give readers a status update of significant events that have occurred in the world of OPC during the first three quarters of 2010.

The OPC Foundation has been actively working with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to get OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) the international standards recognition it deserves through the IEC organization. We expect that the major OPC UA specifications will be released through IEC by the end of 2010.

In addition to the IEC initiative, there were also a number of open source initiatives in the European community based on the OPC technology... Read more

CASE APPLICATION

OPC Solutions Ensure that “The Show Must Go On”

Entertainment production company, Hudson, uses OPC solutions from Kepware on its motion control platform to deliver robust reliability and seamless integration in entertainment projects ranging from Broadway to casinos and amusement parks.

Hudson is one of the largest full service production and scenic fabrication companies serving the professional entertainment community since 1980. Hudson has provided precision automation systems that lower the Times Square New Year's Eve ball, bring the Lady of the Lake up from the depths in Monty Pythons' Spamalot, and allowed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to swoop over audiences' heads. Hudson has the technical expertise that brings the biggest shows to Broadway and takes them on tour, and the award-winning scenic fabrication, automation, and lighting that transform themed casinos, restaurants, and amusement parks into world-class destinations.

As the technical complexity of productions continues to grow, Hudson engineers continually find a need for increased flexibility in the solutions they can offer... Read more

CASE APPLICATION

Rounding Up Wind Farm Data in Cattle Country

A multi-national power company uses the OPC DataHub from Cogent Real-Time Systems to centralize data collection and control of wind farms, resulting in a secure and automated real-time solution.

The landscape is changing in cattle country. The rickety old windmills that used to pump water for the herd are giving way to a new breed of wind turbine. Wind farms operating dozens of wind turbines across the range now feed electricity into the power grid. Recently, a multi-national power company began using Cogent's OPC DataHub to centralize the data collection and control for a group of wind farms spread over several hundred miles in the Southwest United States.

The SCADA engineer responsible for the project's control and data acquisition systems configured an OPC DataHub at each of his wind farms to gather and concentrate the data from all of its OPC servers, and then tunnel it to his data center over a secure, firewalled network. At the data center, the data is fed into the SCADA system and a Pi database... Read more

CASE APPLICATION

OPC Historian Monitors Critical Coating Process for Telescope Lens

The lenses of some very large telescopes at the European Southern Observatory require an annual coating process to enhance photon recording. Historian and InfoLink products from Canary Labs were chosen to help monitor the process.

The European Southern Observatory facilities, the Paranal Observatory located in Chile, South America, is configured with one fixed array of four Unit 8.2 meters Telescopes plus one configurable array of four Auxiliary 1.8 meter Telescopes.

The large telescopes have a diameter of 9.4 meters that need a coating process to cover the mirrors surfaces with a thin layer of highly reflecting aluminum material. This coating ensures that nearly 100% of the photons from celestial objects impinging on the mirrors can be recorded by the sensitive telescope instruments. Due to the unavoidable deterioration of this reflective layer by progressive oxidation and abrasion by airborne particles, the mirrors must be recoated once a year... Read more

OPC Events

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