automated test systems

Specified. tendered for, and managed a team to build the control systems for the Portland Aluminum Smelter. (Team of three people.) This system involved the design. costing and implementation of a control system for a Aluminum smelting pot line This system consisted of a VAX Cluster. 10 PDP 11's as line controllers and numerous micro-computer pot controllers.

The Portland aluminum smelter works is an aluminum smelting plant in Victoria Australia. The system consists of a number of aluminum smelting points operation at approximately 1000 Volts DC. Each pot consists of nodes immersed in a slurry of oxides and liquid aluminum. If current is lost for any significant amount of time it is possible for the aluminum to solidify around the nodes. As the nodes decay the nodes themselves must be moved further into the slurry. Until such time as the degrade to the point where they need to be replaced.

So the two main issues with the control system was to ensure that emergency procedures are carried out if a pot is in danger of cooling down for whatever reason and, secondly, control of the actual process of smelting the Aluminum.

The final system consisted of two DEC VAXes running VMS for fail-over, controlling a number of micro VAXes running RSX and for the continuous monitoring and analysis of the environment. The micro VAXes had unique devices drivers written in order to reduce control latency.