Disabling Alarms under program control

[Davidd]

Is there a way to enable / disable certain alarms being generated under program control?  In the process I'm programming, under certain conditions, when there are maintenance operations occuring in the plant, certan alarms are guaranteed to occur, but have absolutely no meaning.  As the operations staff gets 'concerned' when they get alarms, is there any way to disable these alarms from being generated during periods when I know they are of no value?

David Dudley

daviddu@cctexas.com

[Rick_K]

In this case you should use an Alarm Object (if you are not already). An Alarm Object is able to read particular conditions, before an alarm is generated. Perhaps you make a switch on the panel. The Alarm Object could read this switch and only generate an alarm if the switch is in the a particular position. Basically, giving you the ability to turn on and off the Alarm Generated by the Alarm Object. I have attached a small example of working with the alarm object. By editing the connections you can make the boolean switch make the numeric pot invisible, disabling its ability to be changed and thus disabling any alarms from being generated by it going out of range. This same sort of concept could be applied to your application.  

You can also just change the alarm conditions programmatically so the alarm will not trigger.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/ED1ED5E5B137995986256B9000730543?OpenDocument

[Davidd]

Rick,

Appreciate the idea, but in this application it is extremely impractical.  I've got over 2000 analog values in this application (actual count is 2337 righ now), with low, high, and high-high alarms on each.  The idea of having over 6,000 alarm blocks is disturbing, to say the least.  Also, I'm not wanting to prevent the display of the data, or it's logging, as it has to be reported to the appropriate regulatory agencies even during maintenance conditions.  I'm just trying to stop the alarms from keeping the management personel from being awoken constantly during the night for alarms that are created by a particular unit being maintained.

Any way to just write into the block itself, perhaps setting the priority to zero, or the area to a 'dummy' area or something similar?

Farther I get on this, the more convinced I am that Lookout was not the way to go..........

David Dudley

[Rick_K]

I did not realize your application was so large. What about a clever way of auto-acknowledging the alarms when they happen during maintainence time.

[Davidd]

Rick,

Sorry, I tried that already.  Application is set up so that when an alarm comes in, it is emailed out to the person responsible for the operation of that area.  I thought about just disabling the mailer blocks when an area went into maintenance, but I have far more areas than I do mailer blocks right now, and shutting off a mailer causes all alarms for that area not to be sent, which could be bad if they're just working on a subsection of the particular unit.  I've got around 50-75 alarm areas, but some areas have 10-20 subsections in them.

For right now, I've just turned off the mailers altogether, which has made no end of friends for me, but at least I don't get emailed at 2 AM saying I have a communications error to one of the remote sites, that clears in 30 seconds (which thanks to Lookout, I don't know about till I call in).

David