What does the term SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) mean?

What is SCADA?

Nowadays, due to real industrial system and process complexity results indispensable to count on a SCADA architecture. The SCADA term stands for Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition. Embedded software applications are performance based on computers by means of this concept with the purpose of carrying out measurements, control and supervision over process in real time.

SCADA at the Industry

The SCADA architecture is used in large industrial sector widely and vitally importance for the supervision and control both plants and process. Among activities more representative stands out such as:

1. The Energy Industry, about electrical energy on production, transportation, and distribution.
2. The Petro-Chemistry Industry, for gas and petroleum field, distribution networks, natural gas distribution and pipeline control.
3. The Environmental Industry to treat and purify waste water.
4. The Manufacturing Industry, to convert raw materials and produce consumer goods.
5. Etc.

SCADA at the Education and Investigation

Another very important scope which SCADA system are applied is educational environment, research field specially. The idea of controlling any process variable and supervise possible anomalies offer great advantages if they are compared to manual procedures or process which lack of such technology. Besides, the experiments are carried out more effectively. The final result reliability is much higher without doubt, therefore the work done by the researcher possess a higher credibility. SCADA applications contain large amount of tools which are useful particularly to the research and the studied area such as Analyzing Data in detail once the experimental process has concluded, controlling the automatically the experiments or recording the events while the tests are performed.

• Data Storage:

The data are stored or in a data base either in file format supported by third party software. The data can be represented bot numeric format or graphic format like their trends and distributions independently the way is used. As being available for the users anytime allows different tests to be compared and reach conclusion more truthful.

• Control Algorithm:

The control algorithm codification about the process offers uncountable interesting points compared to manual actions. The parameters can be controlled as in the case of any hardware element programmatically and with total independency of SCADA architecture used. Not only saving time is achieved but it is perfected over the implemented methodology and major exhaustive control for variables which are take part of the experimental process.

• Warning and Alarms:

Warning and alarms during tests add great value, especially, to avoid industrial machines are damaged, as case of the individual are exposed to hazard situations. They are great benefit too because they allow to monitor the variables status which are subjected without physical presence exits. As seen, there are multiples advantages that the use of SCADA can provide to research and discovery environment. Not only it makes easy the researcher´s work but it offers a great flexibility about studied field as case of developing tests autonomously managing each aspect involved in such activity.