IEEE Student Chapter of Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon conducted an industrial visit to Automation Engineers A. B. Pvt. Ltd., Noida on 18th November, 2016. Twenty six from EEE and ECS Department along with faculty member Dr. Deepika Yadav (Associate Professor, EEE) visited the industry.

The objective of industrial visit was to have knowledge of the applications of PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition).

Automation Engineers A.B. Pvt. Ltd. promoted by well - qualified and experienced engineers. AEAB is an international Solution partner & Authorized system house of Siemens ltd. It has grown at an exceptional rate with healthy CAGR of 43.3 % its inception. It is an ISO 9001: 2008 certified group of company, having full-service industrial Automation, Communications and Real Time Systems Integrator. The company started its operations in the year 1998 and has been growing since its inception. The company’s motive is to provide innovative solutions and have a wide satisfied customer base. AEAB is guided by the philosophy to provide innovative solutions that follow best manufacturing practices to deliver quality and reliability.

The team was welcomed by Automation Engineers A. B. Pvt. Ltd., Noida Incharge, Mr. Harish Chand. He took all the students to seminar hall, there Mr. Rajeev Kumar gave brief introduction to students about Automation Engineers A. B. Pvt. Ltd., Noida. Further sharing his view on engineering syllabi, Mr. Rajeev stated that the syllabi of engineering is more than 30 years old when there was just initialization of the automation in industries, but now everything has changed and so the syllabi should also be based on the present scenario and as per the present demand of the industries.

Mr. Rajeev Kumar explained how the advantages of PLC dominated over the disadvantages of Microcontrollers in the terms of numbers of inputs and outputs, memory, networking etc.

He told that automation encompasses many different products that are all used to allow companies to make their products faster and in a more efficient manner. This allows the companies to make more products while spending less money, thus allowing them to be competitive in their marketplace. Industrial Automation is the industry of helping business to automate the systems that produce their goods or services in the most efficient manner possible. He explained more about automation by giving some examples that were automobile assembly line, parcel sorting system, batch brewing system, amusement park ride, bottling lines. In automation the most important part is control system. He gave a brief introduction on PLC (Programmable Logic Controller). PLCs look at states of Inputs. Based on these states, the PLC makes decisions, and then commands output states. The instructions that tell the output devices what to do base on the conditions returned by the input devices are written in programs that are stored and run by the PLC. The earliest automation systems were nothing but directly wired systems i.e. a control system where all the components are designed and tested together and then sold as a complete system. You do not get many choices for controllers, I/O, networks, and software. Eventually, PLCs were developed that could be programmed. This allowed the engineers to easily create much more complex systems than relay panels allowed. It also allowed changes to be made to the system without having to change any actual wiring. PLCs are available in market of different companies. Some vendors of PLC are Siemens, Delta, Mitsubishi, KPIT.

They explained how to make a program in PLC using ladder logic language. An example was given by them so that the students can easily understand how to compile and run the PLC program. The example was as follows:

Each line of code is known as a “rung”. In this example there are 4 rungs, numbered 0, 1 and 2, and the end rung marking the end of the program. The PLC executes the program 1 rung at a time, starting with the first rung and then working down. Each individual rung is executed from the left to the right. Therefore, you typically find the inputs on the left and the outputs on the right. Ladder logic rungs are basically if - then statements. If the input conditions are true, then command the outputs based on a true input. If the input conditions are false, then command the outputs based on a false input.

Some of the information regarding SCADA was delivered in the industrial visit such as: its features - dynamic process graphics, security, trends, data base connectivity etc; its tags - string, analog, discrete etc; its brands - Wonder ware (Intouch), Allen Bradley (RS view 32), Siemens (WinCC), KPIT (Astra) etc.

The industrial visit was very fruitful as students gained knowledge about the application of PLC and SCADA.

Some Glimpses: