Remote Automation Solutions (RAS), as one of the business units under Emerson Process Management, is wellknown globally for its broad RTU family, which includes FloBoss, ROC800, and ControlWave RTU and is easily integrated into the SCADA system run by its OpenEnterprise SCADA software and many other SCADA systems.
With the trend of oil and gas field digitalization or something called smart field or intelligent field, RTU, as the effective product to realize field digitalization, control, automation and optimization, has been widely used for such purpose. With many success stories in world areas and historical experiences, RAS RTU may be the ideal solution and its features and capabilities are deliberately designed and developed to address such market trend or requirements.
Data acquisition is the basic function RTU has to perform very well. All wellheads with installed equipments are valuable assets of the oil and gas companies, and their operation status, wellhead output, personnel health and safety, operaton cost are their real concerns. Consequently it is common for the owner to install many field devices/instruments to monitor the operation and calculate the output. Thanks to the wireless technology, the data or information, like wellhead temparature and casing/tubing pressure, can be collected from the wellheads via wireless through gateway and then via Modbus TCP (as an example) to the RTU. RAS also provides wireless RTU to directly collect data and information from the field wireless instruments in addition to the traditional way of wiring. For some wellheads which need some artificial lifts to maintain productivity, RTU can also collect additional information like plunger arrival from plunger lift as an wireless application example. Others which we call event and alarm to reflect field situation can also be collected by,saved in and reported by RTU. For the diagnostic information from the field devices it can be passed through by RAS RTU via wireless HART to asset management system like AMS. With liquid or gas calculation program installed, RAS RTU is also able to perform flow calculation as well to help understand the output composition. RAS RTU has many options for low bandwidth communication with the SCADA host, such as radio, telephony, CDMA, microwave, even satellite. And such communication can be intermittent, scheduled or requested by the SCADA host, effectively saving power consumption.
With CSA Class 1 Division 2 and working temperature ranging from -40C to 75C, RAS's RTU is designed to be installed in the remote, rugged, even harsh location where it is not safe or environment-friendly for human. Powered by solar panel and battery system, RAS RTU has low power consumption and can independently work with high performance in unmanned territory for long time without special care. Therefore, it can effectively reduce the staff travel to the site or unsafety for the operator unless it really needs someone to fix problem or do maintenance manually. RAS provides RTU choices depending on various I/O count or redundancy requirement, from fixed small-amount I/O RTU, easily configurable RTU, to modular and programmable redundancy RTU . No matter the types of RAS RTU, the historical backfill capability is the too prominent feature to neglect. It stores all data, event, alarm well and properly in local RTU when communication fails for any reason and to be dispatched or uploaded to the upper SCADA host server whenever it resumes, which ensures the integrity of data from oil and gas field!