Ignition Provides Advanced Safety and Efficiency Controls At NREL

Project Overview  

The Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) at NREL is the United States' premier user facility focused on energy systems research, development, and demonstration. Using the ESIF’s plug-and-play infrastructure, researchers connect electrical, thermal, and hydrogen systems across the facility’s 18 laboratories to create forward-thinking energy scenarios that are secure and reliable. Using Ignition, the facility’s engineers ensure research can proceed safely and efficiently, applying different voltages and frequencies across the labs and preventing dangerous backfeeding of power. 

Challenges

One of the most unique features of the ESIF is a Research Electrical Distribution Bus (REDB) that powers electrical devices spread across the spacious research facility. When plotted in 4-point font, the electrical 1-line diagram of REDB takes up a piece of paper approximately 42” tall and 10’ long. Power meters, inverters, hydrogen fuel cells, solar simulators, generators, load banks, microturbines, batteries, automatic transfer switches for microgrids, etc., can all interconnect in a plug-and-play manner. To accomplish this, NREL has over 300 remotely operated circuit breakers and switches that allow them to route power any way they choose. 

With nearly infinite ways to bidirectionally connect research equipment, and many projects running simultaneously, safety is a large concern. In the new SCADA system, researchers check out equipment and circuit breakers they want to use and designate safe boundaries. This segregates sections of the electrical bus so that multiple experiments with different voltages can be conducted at the same time.

Previously, researchers had to manually type in every single switch and piece of equipment as well as all boundaries, and then the old SCADA system would run a recipe verification script against a complex adjacency SQL table. If the researcher had forgotten a boundary or mistyped a piece of equipment, the script would fail, leaving the researcher to troubleshoot why the recipe had not been accepted. Creating a complex recipe involving hundreds of devices could take hours of meticulous work.

In addition, the previous system made no use of automated tools — all tags, screens, and alarms had to be manually created. 

Solution

The upgraded system eases pain points and improves efficiencies for both researchers and facility operations. A researcher simply puts Ignition into “Recipe Configuration Mode” and selects all the equipment they need for a project, while the system automatically applies boundaries. This has sped up recipe creation immensely. Recipes are also historized so that equipment usage over time can be queried and specific projects can be tracked. 

ESIF engineers have also implemented tools that give researchers better visibility into their experiments, such as a live oscilloscope. Any of the thousands of electrical metering points can be loaded into the oscilloscope tool, which can capture up to 12 waveforms at 26,000 samples per second per waveform (up to 312,000 samples per second, displayed live!). 

To address manual tag creation, NREL designed a tag generation tool in Ignition where a user can take the output of the cause-and-effect matrices, create a .csv file with all the device and UDT parameters, and upload this .csv to automatically generate UDT instances in Ignition. Their UDT import tool can also export a report of all the UDTs of a certain type so that devices can be counted or so that all editing of global changes can be done programmatically. This occasionally happens when the REDB bus is added and the complex SQL adjacency table changes. 

A new alarm reporting tool allows the safety team to easily export and review safety settings.  

During the buildout of the Ignition system, several users had informal requests that ESIF Operations didn’t want to overlook, so they designed a formal issue/request submission form in Ignition. When a user submits a request, an email is sent to the Ignition developers, the ticket is assigned to a developer, the change is reviewed, attached to a sitewide Management of Change ticket if applicable, and finally the change can be pushed to the production Ignition servers. This collaborative exchange between researchers and operations resulted in innovative improvements, including the oscilloscope feature. 

Finally, NREL often tests equipment like hydrogen electrolyzer stacks both for longevity (1,000+ hour tests) and how they react to transients in incoming power (simulating power interruptions or variable power sources). Previously, researchers had to manually change setpoints, but now Python and SQL scripts allow them to upload custom load profiles. The load profile can continually change the power input to the test equipment over time so that researchers can determine how the equipment reacts. The scripting and SQL queries for automatic load profiles are all contained within the load profile UDT, so new load profiles are easy to create for new pieces of equipment.

Result

REDB recipe creation has gone from a difficult, meticulous process that only a few engineers knew how to accomplish to a simple and intuitive process that can be taught in less than five minutes. Researchers can rapidly tweak a recipe if they want to test a slightly different configuration, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery. 

The feedback since launch has been overwhelmingly positive. Usability is up, project disruptions are down, and researchers can explore increasingly complex questions. User-friendly and automated laboratory capabilities are critical to advancing NREL’s mission for an affordable and secure energy future.

Start Date: May 2022

Deploy Date: April 2024