Power Plant Monitoring

[hnabati]

I'm a mechanical engineer. Currently I have been assigned as project manager for an efficiency monitoring project in a steam power plant. I'm looking for a software that could be responible for data acquisition of about 250 data points with most flexibilty for power plant operators to communicate with. I have labview ver. 6 on my PC. Is it a good choice for handling the described project or not. thank you in advance for your comment.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

You should have no problem doing what you want with LabVIEW. NI has developed a LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module but this only works with LabVIEW version 7.1. I don't think you can buy it for version 6.0 anymore. Here is a description from NI's site.

# Graphical development for distributed monitoring and control

# Networked database for distributed data logging

# Configuration-based alarms and events

# Real-time and historical trending

# Built-in networking for data sharing and integrating third-party devices

# User-level security for applications

Overview

The LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module is the best way to interactively develop your distributed monitoring and control systems. With the Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module, you can extend your LabVIEW application to view real-time and historical data, configure and manage alarms and events, set up security on your applications, easily network OPC devices and LabVIEW Real-Time targets together into one complete system, and efficiently log data to the distributed historical database. The DSC Module also features intuitive wizards and dialog boxes to help you develop applications faster and better. Whether you need to build a full-scale industrial automation and control system, a high-channel count data logging application, or monitor and log a few dozen I/O points for historical collection, the LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control Module provides the tools to make you more productive.

Like I said, you can do all of the above with regular LabVIEW but the add-on module will make your development go much faster.

[James McAnanama]

You should find LabVIEW well suited to your application. We use LavVIEW in our factory for many things from parts testing, to monitoring the pH from our water treatment plant. I like its flexibility and tight integration with NI hardware. Further, NI has done a good job of keeping their code backward compatible. We have some code that was originally written for LV2.0 on a Mac, now running on a PC, LV 6.0 (we had to upgrade through different versions along the way, but it was fairly straight forward). That is, in my opinion, LabVIEW is a good choice for systems that will have a long life cycle with the possibility of upgrades.