Australian Innovation Wins Major International Competition on Virtual Instrumentation

Perth-based systems integrator ICON Technologies won the Best Application Paper contest in the Measurement and Automation Category at NI Week 2002, held recently in Austin, Texas.

NI Week is a major worldwide conference on Virtual Instrumentation sponsored by National Instruments. NI Week 2002 attracted over 1400 delegates from around the world; over 200 entries were submitted in the Best Application Paper contest.

In their paper "Cold Cuts in Deep Water", ICON Technologies described the development of the monitoring and control system for a new ultra high pressure Subsea Cold Cutting system (SCC). The SCC was designed and patented in Western Australia by Jetcut Offshore Technology, and is the first system of its type in the world. It uses an ultra high pressure abrasive water jet at 2000+ bar to perform cutting at depths of up to 1000 m in a subsea environment. In its first commercial trial the system was used to successfully remove abandoned well heads in 80 m of water in the North-West Shelf gas fields.

The winning paper was selected above all other entries in its category as the most technically challenging, innovative, and cost efficient application of National Instruments' products for computer or network based measurement and automation. The application combined a conventional SCADA interface to a PLC, with high speed acquisition of acoustic data from accelerometers placed on the tool jig, high bandwidth transmission of data over a TCP/IP network, and "near real-time" digital signal processing. Variations in the acoustic signature from the accelerometers were used to monitor and optimise the progress of the cut.

ICON Technologies is one of only 17 National Instruments' Select Integrators worldwide, and the only Select Integrator in the Asia-Pacific region. The application was completed in under 3 weeks using National Instruments LabVIEW DSC software. LabVIEW DSC is ideally suited to demanding applications that combine conventional supervisory control of PLCs with non-standard I/O, mixed data types, network connectivity, and complex data analysis.