The cogeneration plant employs a distributed control system (DCS)from the Westinghouse Electric Corporation for control and monitoring of the plant. A distributed control system is characterized by the actual control processing taking place in several redundant processing units. These distributed processing units (DPUs) receives analog inputs from field instruments, discretizes them, performs digital calculations on them, and outputs a signal to control instruments and actuators.
In addition, all of the data from the control system, as well as other data sources, is archived to a PI system from OSI Software. This is the database that provides all of the real-time and historical data for these web pages.
The weather data available on these pages is captured from a Davis Instrumentsweather stations mounted on top of the plant. MIT community members can access these data points through web services or direct interfaces for their research. Please contact Christopher Russo for more details.
The following screens show some of the screens that the operators use to control the plant. These images were grabbed and edited with the program XV.
