BLIIoT Industrial PLC Gateway BL102 Applied to Boiler Monitoring

1. Project background

Boilers are indispensable power equipment in industrial production such as chemical industry, oil refining, and power generation. With the continuous expansion of industrial production scale and continuous innovation of production equipment, the boiler as the power and heat source of the whole plant is also developing towards large capacity, high parameters and high efficiency. Due to the current level of boiler automation control is not high, boilers are mainly inspected manually, but the location of the boiler equipment is scattered, if the inspection and maintenance require the presence of maintenance personnel, it is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also the cost of operation and maintenance is huge. The staff on duty only knew about the failure and reported it by phone, resulting in a delay in dealing with the problem. In order to ensure safe and stable production, the Internet of Things monitoring solution is adopted. Through the Internet of Things, the online real-time monitoring of boilers can realize the remote online collection, monitoring, statistics, analysis and intelligent decision-making of energy saving and emission reduction of boiler operating data, and establish a comprehensive twenty-four for boilers. Hourly monitoring is particularly important.

2. Situation Analysis

• Boilers are relatively independent, decentralized, and inconvenient to manage

With the large-scale expansion of industrialization, boiler installations are also increasing, but the equipment is relatively vertical, geographically scattered, and even has a large space span, which is not convenient for managers to quickly and effectively monitor and manage each site.

• Boiler operation and maintenance service costs are high, and labor costs are large

Offline operation and maintenance services, high travel costs, and high time costs: the reuse rate of equipment service technology is low, no one records and maintains the knowledge of work order operation and maintenance, and cannot view summary reports for repairs, repairs, and inspection records. Unable to objectively assess operation and maintenance personnel.

• Unable to understand the operating status of boiler equipment in real time

The state of boiler equipment is uncontrollable to a certain extent, and it is impossible to know the internal operating state of the equipment and the thermal efficiency of the boiler at any time only through manual inspection.

• Without remote video monitoring, on-site faults cannot be fed back and dealt with in a timely manner

When the equipment fails, on-site maintenance personnel are required to actively discover the equipment failure, but the automation of the boiler is not high, so the alarm cannot be received in time, and the problem cannot be checked in time, which is time-consuming and laborious.

• There is no complete system monitoring data support, lack of scientific analysis and statistical means

Manual alone cannot record a large amount of data in real time, and cannot understand the historical conditions and data of boiler operation.

3. IoT Boiler Monitoring Significance

IoT boiler remote monitoring adopts industrial-grade network transmission and storage technology, real-time acquisition and edge calculation of boiler online operating parameters. It can not only ensure the safe and stable operation of the boiler, reduce the labor intensity of operators, but also improve thermal efficiency, reduce coal and electricity consumption, realize economical operation, and achieve the purpose of easy operation and production management.

4. Design principles

The system design takes into account the following principles:

• Applicability: Fully research and analyze customer needs, and combine the current status of equipment and customers' long-term planning to realize system functions under the concept of long-term, reliable, advanced and energy-saving
• Advancement: Apply the Internet of Things system, advanced control hardware and network technology to optimize and improve the design of the remote control system
• Economy: use the most reasonable software and hardware configuration to achieve high performance-price ratio
• Reliable and safe: In the system design, the hardware and software are fully considered, the isolation of faults and the weakening of the scope of influence are carried out according to the standard during installation and debugging
• Execution: The system design, software and hardware configuration, network and communication protocol, database, etc. all meet the relevant international and domestic standards. Interfaces are reserved during system design, making hardware and software functional modules easy to maintain, expansion, and upgrades can be completed in a short period of time.

5. Framework

The boiler remote control system consists of three parts, 1. Front-end sensors, boiler equipment 2. BLIIoT Industrial PLC Gateway BL102 3. IoT cloud platform/Server

The BLIIoT Industrial PLC Gateway BL102 collects the data of the boiler equipment at the lower end and uploads the data to the cloud platform, and provides functions such as equipment networking and edge computing. The cloud platform is the operation platform of the solution, and relevant equipment teaching data, report information, and operating parameters are all on the cloud platform. Summarize and display on the Internet to provide users with analysis and decision-making basis. At the same time, the user's management and control of the device is also operated on the cloud platform.

6. Scheme detailed design

Hardware design

The silver furnace remote monitoring system consists of two parts, silver furnace equipment, gateway acquisition equipment, cloud platform/mobile phone monitoring center. The gateway collection equipment is connected to the furnace equipment, and the gateway uploads the collected boiler data to the cloud platform/server through 4G/Ethernet. Since Internet transmission is not limited by distance, multiple terminal devices can be connected to one monitoring center at the same time, so one monitoring center can monitor multiple boiler equipment. The monitoring center is mainly responsible for processing the data sent by each terminal, and displaying and saving the historical data in real time on the computer. At the same time, the monitoring center can also give a real-time alarm to the dangerous data that appears.

Platform monitoring

• Remote monitoring of equipment: All parameters of the boiler can be monitored in real time through the web page or mobile APP, including the operating status of the boiler, and the collection of PLC data is supported to make message exchange faster and more convenient, and the same monitoring screen as the scene can be quickly built. Remotely monitor the status of the boiler as if you were on site, which can solve the problems of difficult equipment maintenance, high travel costs, and delays in obtaining information.
• Fault alarm and remote diagnosis: set different thresholds for boiler steam pressure, temperature, flow rate, furnace door temperature, main body exhaust gas temperature, water level and other parameters. If a fault occurs, it will be sent through WeChat message, APP message, and telephone voice at the first time , SMS and other notifications to the management personnel. Real-time understanding of boiler operation through the cloud platform, so that faults can be quickly located and resolved without going to the site.
• Statistical analysis of historical reports: the platform can realize the data summary calculation of multiple boiler equipment, and can carry out intermediate summary variable storage and statistics on boiler furnace pressure, primary return water pressure, outlet water pressure, total steam flow and other data, so as to achieve historical There are traces of data. High-quality reports can make the basic situation of the boiler more transparent and help managers make decisions that are conducive to improving production efficiency.
• Rich user permissions: For convenience, system functions need to be customized according to different users, adding roles with different permissions. Set up different roles to view different menus, add different accounts to view user operation log information, and facilitate the fine-grained management of personnel.
• Operation and maintenance management: users can make equipment inspection plans, and realize equipment repair, maintenance inspection records and other operations on the mobile phone. It can manage the whole life cycle of consumable and core components of the burner, effectively improving the efficiency of after-sales work. Realize that maintenance problems can be checked back and traced to compact operation and maintenance responsibilities.
• Data summary large screen: display the operating status and work data of boiler equipment scattered in different locations in the form of charts, which can be monitored uniformly through computers, mobile phones and large screens. The data display in the form of graphics is more three-dimensional, Can be seen at a glance. Moreover, the graphical display can clearly see the dynamic changes at the first time.

7. Solution advantage

• Wide compatibility: All serial devices with Moubus protocol can be connected to the IoT cloud platform with simple configuration, plug and play. The gateway adopts an independent interface module, so there is no need to modify boilers, water pumps and other equipment.
• Efficient operation: The data center adopts a modular and matrix design, and each functional module can process large amounts of data in a timely manner, and multiple connections can also run smoothly.
• Diversified display: Users can remotely view the operating status of the equipment through mobile APP, computer webpage, and mobile webpage.
• Reliable and stable performance: It has provided wireless monitoring solutions for many customers, and has specialized processing for equipment management, data display, disaster prevention backup and other functions to ensure reliable and stable operation of the system for a long time
• Low cost: no need to build a network, no need to install a server, and no need to hire professional engineers, just connect the gateway to the device to be monitored, enter the platform for simple configuration,
• 7x24 hours of safe operation and maintenance：the gateway acts as a device manager for 24-hour comprehensive inspection of equipment, and implements unified monitoring access and intelligent alarms for all servers under the platform
• Data transmission security: the gateway supports TSL, SSL and OPENVPN functions to ensure data security.

More information about the BLIIoT Industrial 4G PLC Gateway BL102: https://www.bliiot.com/plc-gateway-p00306p1.html