A smarter way to save energy

摘要

The escalating price of fossil fuels marked by global competition is driving process industry decision makers to rethink the way their businesses will perform in the future. In order to stay competitive, manufacturers will have to develop strategies to conserve energy and limit usage of depleting and increasingly expensive resources. However, the challenge in achieving this goal is to do so without disrupting production. Simon Ellam from Siemens Industry Automation highlights how the integration of Smart Motor Controls into a process automation system can play a vital role in energy conservation strategies. Energy consumption is the second largest operating expense in a plant after raw materials and the integration of smart motor controls to monitor energy usage can remove wasteful expenditure, prevent unplanned downtime and improve overall operational efficiency. Distributed control systems (DCS) were designed to provide regulatory control for the process control industry. They were based on proprietary components such as operating systems, networks, hardware and configuration tools. The standard DCS was mainly designed for communication within system boundaries, PLCs on the other hand, were designed for high-speed control of discrete devices such as motors, pumps and drives.