Libpf.com staff will attend on June 8th to 10th 2010 the POWER-GEN Europe 2010 Conference and Exhibition in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and present the paper “Model based soft-sensors based on OPC Unified Architecture”.

Abstract:

Process modeling can be arranged as a domain-specific information model on top of OPC Unified Architecture, the new platform-independent standard for interoperability between enterprise information systems and industrial automation. With this technology model-based soft-sensors can be implemented as components in a Service Oriented Architecture, with the option to discover, set-up, configure and schedule the models from within the control system maintenance user interface.

In this work a prototype implementation of a first-principle soft sensor is presented, wrapped as an OPC UA Server. That soft-sensor calculates water and natural gas properties based respectively on the IAPWS-95 and GERG-2004 equations of state.

The thermodynamic calculations are implemented using LIBPF (LIBrary for Process Flowsheeting), a process flowsheeting and modeling tool arranged as a C++ library. The object-oriented design and portability of the LIBPF library fits perfectly with the philosophy of OPC UA, allowing for reduced development time and an extremely lean implementation. The soft sensor can be deployed either in embedded devices or as a server daemon/service.