DEVELOPING A LOW-COST SCADA SYSTEM FOR INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION

Abstract

In this project, a low-cost industrial SCADA system has been presented which has been developed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Bangladesh is a developing country and there are many SMEs in the country contributing to the country’s economy. Commercial SCADA systems, which are available in the market, are costly to set up and maintain for smaller companies. Also, the controlling and data acquisition interface of the loads through software has to be developed which is also costly. As a result, keeping the cost-cut of the small companies in mind, those SCADA systems can’t be used in general. So a low-cost SCADA system prototype has been designed for SMEs. In this project, two microcontrollers have been used for faster data acquisition and better performance for the logic switching of loads by minimizing the switching delay. For the designing purpose, the circuit has been divided into two parts. The first part was designing two rooms with priority-based loads and controlling them via Arduino Mega 2560 and relay modules. The second part was to get data from loads of the two rooms using Arduino Uno and an Ethernet shield connected to the Wi-Fi router. The data acquisition of the loads was done using current sensors and uploading the data to the Blynk app for live observation using an Ethernet shield connected to the router through a LAN cable. These two parts have been connected to complete the whole circuit of this project. Available commercial SCADA system uses PLC microcontroller and RTUs for faster data streams to provide remote indication and control of system parameters which is developed for bigger industries. As a result, the software interface for data acquisition and control is alone very costly to develop. But in this project, a free software, the Blynk app is used for data acquisition and controlling of the loads for different rooms. This app is connected to the internet server through Wi-Fi which is responsible for all the interaction between the smartphone or laptop and hardware. This app is free of cost and available for free download in Play Store but a certain amount of money is needed to unlock more features of the app. But for this project to properly function, there were no extra features needed. As a result, free software has been which results in cost-cut for SMEs for monitoring loads of the whole designed prototype system of this project. And the hardware that has been used in this project such as relay modules, current sensors which are available in local markets and cheaper. The installment and maintenance of this project are also cheap and easy which results in cost-cut as compared to commercially available SCADA systems. This book illustrated how this prototype system works and gave an elaborate concept about this project based on SCADA.