Process automation

Distributed measurement system

Krohne is an international concern that develops complete flow measurement solutions for the process instrumentation industry. An important area within Krohne are the liquid and gas flow meters with diameters ranging from a couple of mm’s to almost 3 meter. With their flow meters they cover a large application area inside i.e. the oil, gas and food industry, water companies and pharmaceutical industry. The Krohne group in the Netherlands develops, produces and calibrates the whole range of flow meters. Relitech develops and maintains their process automation software. Recent work for Relitech is the development of automation software for a new (flow meter) multi-rig calibration system.

Three pistons at work

Three pistons at work

This calibration system actually consists of three separate pistons, each capable of producing a very accurate water flow of in a range from 10 to max. 300 m3/h. When larger flows are required, the hardware configuration can be automatically altered such that two or three pistons can operate together, enabling a flow of max. 900 m3/h. The three pistons have three control PC’s that operate in a small network. Each piston can operate as master (water is needed for its own calibration), or as slave (water is requested elsewhere).

Multi-rig configuration

Three independent calibration sites can work together when needed

State-of-the-art technology was used for the presentation of the calibration process with Microsoft WPF and the communication between the three PC’s with Microsoft WCF. The PC software is developed in C#.

Within the project specialized aspects of software development can be found:

  • WCF discovery for automatic online and offline detection of the three systems.
  • WPF with MVVM pattern for building a responsive GUI.
  • Multi threaded acquisition and control
  • Multi master mode
  • Hardware and software synchronization of the three systems