Kitimat Power Monitoring System

Location

Kitimat, British Columbia

Customer

Alcan Smelters & Chemicals Ltd.

Completion Date

February 1999

Background

Kitimat Works is a production unit of Alcan Smelters and Chemicals, and is the only aluminum smelter in Western Canada. The design of the plant dates back to the early 1950s. Its annual capacity is 272,000 tons, produced by seven reduction potlines.

Universal Dynamics designed and implemented the original Kitimat Power Monitoring System (KPMS) at Alcan in the early 1990s, based on the OS/2, PS/2 and Dbase III technology. The system monitors, trends and calculates performance statistics on the operation of the potline rectifiers for the entire plant. Powerful reporting and user interface features were part of the reason for the successful and trouble-free operation of this system.

Recently, the operating system and computer equipment of the KPMS system were becoming increasingly unsupportable, while facing year 2000 problems that were inherent in the original operating system and database libraries.

Alcan wished to preserve the original functions of the power monitoring system while upgrading it to a modern platform. Universal Dynamics recommended an upgrade to the Windows NT operating system, Pentium PC, and SQL database, providing long-term maintainability of the system.

Project Scope

Universal Dynamics provided the system upgrade based on a powerful real-time data management kernel originally developed for our BrainWave^® product. It also featured a Java-based Graphical User Interface and calculation application, historical data storage in a networked SQL database, report generation using Microsoft Access and an OPC (OLE for Process Control) communications link to the PLC I/O system.

Benefits from the Project

Alcan Works Power department relies heavily on the special calculation and trending characteristics of the KPMS system, to assist them in regulating the performance of the potline rectifiers. The upgraded system reproduces the utility and robustness of the original system, while providing an improved graphical interface for Alcan operators, and extends its maintainability for many years into the future.

Highlights

The KPMS system provides real-time and historical multivariable trending and a suite of complex error calculations, with the ability to forward chain any manual data corrections to all subsequent performance accumulations. Calculated data included downtime, average current, voltages and AC or DC Power, conversion efficiencies, current error, efficiency error, total power, and power utilization. Reporting functions include periodic automatic or demand reports of calculated data, transmission status, and daily/monthly summaries.

Sample Historic Monitoring Tabular Display

Sample Historic Monitoring Trend Display