I came across this news article about the major alumina refinery expansion at Alcan Gove in Australia’s Northern Territory.   It caught my attention because I’ve actually been to that site conducting OPC training on one of my many jaunts around the globe.  For those of you who don’t know where Gove is, it’s nearly as north as you can get in the Northern Territory.   If you are heading to the middle of nowhere and turn at the third tumbleweed on the left, you’ll probably find Gove.  Actually I had a very good time.  The people where friendly and I stayed at the quaintly named Walkabout Hotel  (actually I think it’s the only hotel in Gove).  The Australian outback has a beauty all it’s own.   (We’ll all remember Steve Irwin for bringing a little bit of it to everyone.)

Back to OPC.   Alcan was using OPC to tie together their ABB Conductor stations, Emerson DeltaV DCS and Siemens S7 PLC system in a redundant communication setup.   (Redundancy is commonly used in critical data systems).   Their particular setup was using the MatrikonOPC Data Manager in a way I had never seen before.   The OPC server portion was installed on a different machine pointing to multiple copies of the Client portion.   Ultimately the architecture was changed due to changing requirements, but it goes to show that no matter how you design a product to be used, there is always someone who’s going to do something different.  That’s the beauty of OPC, it gives you lot’s of options.

Alcan’s going to need some options.   $500 million extra and they haven’t started up yet.  Crikey!  I bet when they start tying together all those ‘pre-assembled modules’ together with software, they will find a lot of use for OPC.