Mesa Associates Incorporated is a full-service engineering, procurement and construction management firm specializing in power, defense, aerospace, industrial, commercial and municipal entities. Mesa offers power delivery systems including electrical high-voltage, substations, switchyard, transmission line, and distribution design. Mesa also provides SCADA, PLC, and systems integration services to include server setup with standard and virtual systems. The company’s headquarters is located in Madison, Alabama with satellite offices located across the United States. Their systems integration department along with their machine build group is located in Knoxville, Tennessee with a panel build facility located in Greeneville, Tennessee.
Mesa’s System Integration team was hired by a boiler manufacturing facility located in middle Tennessee to engineer a new boiler test station solution for the company. The project scope required the system to retrieve test parameters from a remote SAP PI system located in Ohio. Using the unit’s serial number, the system queries the SAP database for the specific test parameters needed. The scope also requires the production test stands to be separate from the SAP PI interface to maintain network security. The test stand interfaces with a high-accuracy PLC system monitoring flow meters and flow switches supplying gas flow to the main test boiler. Flow rates for the system are in the 3 to 5 million BTU ranges and have to maintain an accuracy of 1% of reading. Communications to the PLC is through Modbus TCP/IP.