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"The most impressive open automation application in the world!"
SoftPLC selected as standard controller for large Hydro-Electric Power Plants
"When you cut through all of the marketing hype and you get down to real
product testing SoftPLC is clearly the best PC based controller." —USACE Engineer
SoftPLC Corporation's flagship open architecture controller, SoftPLC
was selected in 1997 by the US Army Corps of Engineers - Hydroelectric Design
Center (USACE-HDC) as the standard process controller for 12 large hydro power
generating plants. SoftPLC is helping USACE continue to provide its customers
with clean, low-cost, reliable electric power.
SoftPLC is being used to automate and control turbine generator units in some
of the largest hydro generation plants in the United States. There currently
are 135 SoftPLC controlled turbine generator units with a total output capacity of 14 GigaWatts (or nearly
17% of all US hydroelectric capacity)! Over 38,000 I/O points are being controlled!
"I can't remember a time in the last 20 years that
a vendor went to the lengths that SoftPLC Corp. did to ensure our projects
were a success." —USACE Engineer
To select their controller, the USACE-HDC conducted extensive product reviews followed by a lengthy product testing process. All major proprietary hardware PLC's and open architecture PC based control products were reviewed and tested. Due to the mission critical nature of the application, the process also included stress testing to determine the robustness and reliability of each product.
SoftPLC was the only PC based controller that did not crash during the entire product review, testing and stress testing period.
"Product selection
was based on research and in house testing, not marketing hype, which
resulted in the 'best in class' products and technology being selected." —USACE Engineer
SoftPLC was ultimately selected over all other alternatives because it offered a flexible, open architecture system for application
s today and into the future. Additionally, SoftPLC was also most suited for the mission critical nature of turbine generator control, proven by the testing to be an extremely reliable product.
 Moreover,
the USACE was interested in taking advantage of SoftPLC's custom C/C++ &
Java instructions, virtually unlimited data memory and user logic capacity,
extremely fast logic scan time, 100MB Ethernet TCP/IP interface, Java Servlet
enabled web server, and embedded FTP server.
The turbine generator control project has proven extremely successful, with
the first turbine generator units under SoftPLC control for almost 7 years now.
This success led to hundreds of other applications for SoftPLC into the hydro
plants such as turbine blade control, fish way and screen automation, powerhouse
mux control, orifice gate control, and others.
The USACE-HDC testing process was designed to pick the "best in class"
product(s) from the products tested, which when installed together would
result in the best open automation solution. Product review and testing
were done not only for the controller, but also for the I/O, communication
network, and operator interface software.
The "best in class" open automation system ultimately selected was SoftPLC
Corporation's SoftPLC® control software, GE Fanuc's iFix™ SCADA
software and MTL's I/O-95™.
Dan Perrier, president of Automated Control Systems, Inc. and system
integrator on the USACE-HDC project writes: "SoftPLC
was selected as the controller supplier for a number of reasons. Its
control software is compatible with the Allen-Bradley PLC instruction
set and communication protocols, it easily and reliably integrates with
other vendor technologies, has virtually unlimited program and data
capacities, and has an extensible instruction set that allows the user
to develop advanced functionality in C/C++ and Java. Project personnel
used the extensible instructions to implement advanced control calculations
and communication protocols to a number of other computing systems."
"We implemented plant wide control functions including
allocation of generating units and reporting on equipment capacity with
a C++ control engine that utilitized an XML system model to control
how the software worked at each site. The XML system modeling has been
a great design."
"The first control systems installed have been running
for almost 7 years and have surpassed expectations for uptime, usability,
flexibility and operational readiness. The operator and technician acceptance
of the system has been tremendous."
Ethernet TCP/IP was selected as the best PLC communication network, implemented
over 100MB full duplex switched fiber optic network. Ethernet at 100MB proved
to easily have the best performance, lowest cost, and was the most open PLC
communications network for peer to peer networking between the SCADA and SoftPLC's.
Each turbine generator unit control cell has a
SoftPLC Processor
and approximately 200 points of MTL I/O-95. Within each hydro plant there
are 3 to 27 turbine generator units communicating over the 100MB TCP/IP
Ethernet network. Each hydro plant has several iFix view nodes also connected
to the 100MB TCP/IP Ethernet network. These iFix applications have been
reported to have the single largest database and fastest throughput of
any iFix application in the world.
 SoftPLC
Corporation's world class service and support also played a role in the final
selection process, helping ensure the customer was able to integrate the multi-vendor
components very successfully.
The control systems at the largest of these hydro generating power plants
have been estimated by many to be the single most impressive
open automation application in the world, removing any doubt that
open automation works for large mission critical applications.
SoftPLC Corporation President and founder Dick Hollenbeck
says: "Although it's an increasing trend to do in-house
testing, you had to be impressed with the level of detail in HDC's test
process. As more customers take the time to do studies of this kind, SoftPLC
benefits disproportionately because our product is rock solid and customers
see this in the tests."
"It was kind of interesting to sit back and watch all
the hype and nervousness about Y2K. With somewhere around three percent of
all U.S. power production under direct SoftPLC control, we were very confident
that at least our part of the U.S. power production was going to hold up."
"We are in the unique position of being able to walk
into many of our prospective customer accounts and calmly inform them
that we are already controlling their plant, indirectly. SoftPLC is proud
to be providing power to approximately 3 out of every 100 Americans."
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