A Trenton Systems Application Story - Oil Field Diagnostics

Amongst a whole host of other things, Trenton Systems designs and manufactures a range of rugged rackmount computer systems for test & measurement applications, including the collection, validation and analysis of data from probes and sensors that measure parameters like temperature, pressure, speed, flow, strain, vibration, humidity & torque.

In this application story we look at the use of a complete Trenton System in an Oil Field Diagnostics project.

The Customer Need
An industry leader in oil exploration and equipment relies on computer systems installed in large tractor-trailer rigs to monitor and record production data in mature oil fields. The systems can also be used in exploratory fields to gather and record geologic data from various sensors in order to determine drilling feasibility. Chassis depth is at a premium in the truck and hard drive shock is a real application concern.

The Trenton Solution
A single board computer and backplane were used in this application due to the variety of option cards (PCI Express, PCI-X and 32-bit/33MHz PCI) used by the customer. The Trenton T4L board using an Intel® Pentium® 4 processor was chosen for its long-life support feature and its low cost. The Trenton backplane chosen was the BPG6600 for the shallow-depth of the 4U computer chassis.

Trenton Value Delivered
Many systems have been delivered and put through rigorous field tests. The customer reported extraordinary performance results with the robust, cost-effective design of the Trenton TML and BPG6600 solution. The customer projected that over the lifetime of the system, Trenton’s ability to provide this same system configuration for several years will provide a significant cost savings by virtually eliminating system re-engineering design costs due to computer component EOL issues.

Trenton Systems offers an industry-leading 5 year warranty on all of their single board computers, backplanes and embedded motherboards.

The BPX8093 is one of the latest releases from Trenton Systems, supporting one PICMG® 1.3 single board computer and up to ten PCI Express I/O cards. Nine of these option card slots are PCI Express 3.0 capable.  Each option card slot uses a x16 PCIe mechanical connector to maximise system design flexibility by supporting a wide range of standard PCI Express I/O cards.

For more information please contact the Sarsen sales team on +44 1672 511166, or email us - info@sarsen.net.

Wind Power Generator Monitor and Control

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electrical power or windmills for mechanical power.

The UEIPAC from United Electronic Industries (UEI) is an ideal solution for monitoring and controlling wind power generators, powerful enough to provide control for everything from blade angle to output voltage and log everything from wind speed to power output.

The UEIPAC’s easy access to Ethernet means it can easily run as a slave to a primary host PC when desired, but can take over and run stand-alone if anything happens to the primary communications link. It's very easy to set up - build your application on a Linux PC, or a Windows PC using Cygwin, and once developed, compile your code and download it to the UEIPAC. From there it can run fully stand-alone, or you can keep it on your network to provide updates to your host.

The Cube’s rugged environmental spec eliminates the need for any heating or cooling in the control rack. The standard UEIPAC cubes are tested from -40° to +85° C, at 100 g shock, 5 g vibration and altitudes up to 120,000 feet and are tough enough for the most challenging applications. All I/O is fully isolated from the controller so the UEIPAC is largely immune to the glitches and spikes so commonly seen in the grounds of an industrial environment.

In more complex applications, we have customers running very complex vibration analysis to identify degradation in bearings, transmissions and turbines. This data can then be correlated with other information acquired allowing the implementation of a very powerful predictive maintenance program.

We also have a number of customers who use UEI’s Cubes and RACKtangles as remote communications links. Applications for remote serial communications include wind farms where the system needs to consolidate RS-485 data from a series of turbines and send the data to the supervisory computer.

For more information on the UEIPAC or any of the UEI products please contact the Sarsen team on +44 1672 511166 or email us - info@sarsen.net