Though National Instruments (NI) takes some pride in the diversity of the markets it serves—no single industry accounts for more than 15 percent of its overall business, which offers stability when one industry takes a hit—oil and gas remains an important industry for the company, with more than 35,000 customers a year. At the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) earlier this month in Houston, NI was showing off some of its latest technology advances most relevant to oil and gas customers.
Certainly, drastically lower oil prices have been difficult for the industry over the past few years. But the slump has also afforded some companies the time they need to retool their fleets and think about innovating. “When prices are good, those trucks are being used,” commented Brett Burger, principal marketing manager for NI. “When things slow down a bit, there’s more time for technology upgrades.”
Two key capabilities always important to oil and gas—or any other industry—are driving production efficiency and improving uptime. To demonstrate recent innovations for driving production efficiency, NI turns to a customer that has become a mainstay in its OTC booth, Lime Instruments, which designs hydraulic pressure pumping controllers on some of NI’s hardware. “NI technology is used to help automate a lot of those big, nasty processes,” Burger said. “Humans could use help to do better.”
Machine learning was much talked about at OTC this year, and it’s a growing part of the discussion for improving uptime. There’s an increasing amount of attention being given to not only feeding asset health data from machines to human experts, but also feeding that data into computer-based machine learning, Burger said, noting as an example of the technology the type ofintelligent learning that National Oilwell Varco (NOV) is doing带有顶级驱动器。
汉堡说：“对[机器学习]以及一些早期部署都非常感兴趣。”“但是仍然有很多繁重的工作。”
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) were also hot commodities at OTC this year, and this was another area where NI was showing off what could be coming as the technology matures. As an example of the continuous improvements being done on asset health monitoring, VR has been added to the智能泵NI has been demonstrating along with several other vendors, including Flowserve, PTC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and OSIsoft.
With all the talk of late about edge devices within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), one thing to keep in mind is just how harsh that edge environment often is in the oil and gas industry. In past OTC displays, NI has shown off just how rugged its CompactRIO industrial controller is, shaking and baking it for visitors. But this year, NI demonstrated its continued innovation on its rugged line of processor- and sensor-based controllers, Burger said.
他说：“绝大多数Compactrio客户仍然坚固耐用，仍然把它置于围栏中。”“但是我们有一些不想要那个盒子的客户。”
Released near the end of last year, the IC-3173 industrial controller is NI’s first IP67-rated controller, able to operate in the presence of dust and water in the kinds of harsh environments common in the industry. Also released late last year is the FieldDAQ—NI’s most rugged DAQ device to date. Also rated to IP67 standards, it can operate in -40 to 85 °C environments and can sustain 100 g shock and 10 g vibration. That shock rating is twice what most of NI’s devices can sustain, Burger noted.
他说：“我们对这些产品感到非常兴奋 - 不仅仅是因为它们的坚固性，而且还因为我们开始利用时间敏感的网络（TSN）。”“ FieldDAQ单元之间的所有测量都将使用TSN功能同步。而且您不需要外部同步触发器或同步电缆就可以做到这一点。”这在石油和天然气环境中很重要，最好将接线最小化。
这些创新中有许多将在Niweek本周在德克萨斯州奥斯汀。实际上，NI在展厅中创建了一个2,000平方英尺的空间，重新创建了Industrial IoT LabNI去年年初开业。对于其IIOT技术演示之一，NI，HPE，PTC和Flowserve与Microsoft Hololens一起组装了泵健康监测系统，以提高资产健康的可见性。
Another section is all about the platform technology, Burger noted. “People can see the FieldDAQ, industrial controller, CompactRIO controllers—and how they work with TSN technology,” he said, adding that visitors will be able to pick up and play with the equipment in the “petting zoo.” Visitors will also be able to get a look at the shake-and-bake demo of the rugged controllers.
