The Customer:
Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC), a division of United Technologies Corporation, is a leader in aerospace with product development, manufacturing operations and service centres spanning the globe. P&WC offers an impressive range of products, including turbofan, turboprop and turboshaft engines targeted at regional, business, utility and military aircraft and helicopter markets. P&WC also designs and manufactures engines for auxiliary power units and industrial applications.

The Challenge:
P&WC was recently engaged by a China-based engineering company to develop a method of pumping gas through a pipeline using one of the company's standard gas turbine engines - the ST40. The plan involved drawing off a small amount of gas to fuel the engine in order to drive the rest of the gas through the compressor and up the pipeline. P&WC supplies the engine for the pumping station, while other suppliers designed the balance of plant.

The Pratt & Whitney ST40 is an industrial engine derived from the PW150A series of aviation turboprop powerplants.

The revolutionary design concept posed a number of engineering challenges for P&WC. Engineers required a flexible platform on which to develop the control system, and to implement it in the field.

The Solution:
Since MATRIXx is P&WC's tool of choice for the development of real time embedded control systems, Opal-RT Technologies' RT-LAB proved to be ideal for use as a development platform, and was used by P&WC to develop the control system development environment for the project, as well as the integrated control system that is intended for field use.

RT-LAB is the real-time technology that revolutionizes the way model-based design is performed within the engineering organization. Through its openness, RT-LAB provides the flexibility and scalability to be tailored to the project's simulation and control needs. This allows P&WC to add computation power where and when needed-whether to dramatically speed up simulations, to perform ongoing self-testing, or for real-time hardware-in-the-loop applications.

Hardware used was based on National Instruments' PXI industrial PC platform, signal conditioning units, and data I/O boards. The software used to develop the Human/Machine Interface was National Instruments' LabVIEW. The CompactPCI-based PXI platform offers a small footprint, and rugged packaging, at a low cost. This modular design can be modified or expanded to meet changing system needs -- from reconfiguring to test new system components, to implementing new instrumentation to meet increased testing demands. In addition, P&WC's choice of National Instruments' products for use in the project proved crucial because of their track record for reliability and performance. In addition, because National Instruments is a global company, replacement parts can be more easily sourced.

RT-LAB provided seamless integration between the development environment and the controller allowing changes to the control strategy, parameters, and to be made more efficiently.

RT-LAB also includes support for multirate systems on the same processor as well as on different processors. This reduces the amount of redundant cycles in the processor, and thereby freeing up computation power for more critical systems.

The system entered the test phase in Q4 2002 with the objective of deploying the system at several pumping stations along the pipeline.

The Benefits:
P&WC's choice to use Opal-RT and National Instruments products in the development of this project resulted in a significant decrease in the amount of physical testing of the system prior to deployment. Instead of using a real engine during testing, P&WC engineers used real-time dynamic simulations of engines, running on RT-LAB Engineering Simulators. The simulations allow the engineer to set up different running conditions, and change parameters as needed. In this way, the engineer can immediately see the response of the system to parameter changes and different conditions, providing a clean, safe, risk-free way of testing the system prior to deployment, and conducting self-tests as required after deployment.