Omniflex was formed in 1997 from the Conlog Industrial Division, well known for over 30 years in the South African and international markets for the design and manufacture of high quality electronics instruments for diverse applications within industry.
The team responsible for the modern product development has a strong background in systems engineering, designing and commissioning turnkey control systems as early as 1970 for major industries throughout South Africa. This experience has enabled a focused approach to development of core products for niche market segments, marketing these over the last 18 years through a worldwide network of qualified agents and distributors.
Manufacturing
Omniflex designs and manufactures all of its own products, sub-contracting some of the PCB assembly to contract manufacturers. The company has permits from SABS to apply the SABS 547:1993 mark for the manufacture of intrinsically safe apparatus and the SABS 970:1971 mark for non-sparking electrical equipment.
A number of significant Eskom National Contracts for the design and manufacture of various industrial electronics products, have been secured over the years, contributing to company growth and R&D investment.
Networking technology
The Conet-branded networking technologies developed by the Omniflex team have resulted in a vast number of cost-effective solutions in many industries around the world, where often a competing fieldbus or other PLC network was unable to fulfil the requirement. One of Conet's most amazing capabilities as a twisted pair local area network, is the ability to run on very poor grade cable, often over long distances (up to 10 km). This enables many plants to utilise existing unused pairs for communications, saving the otherwise huge sums of money which would be needed to install new cabling.
Conet is available as a twisted pair network (up to 62 500 baud), a coaxial cable network (2,5 Mbaud), a radio network (2400 baud) and in future will be available on Ethernet (10 Mbaud). Conet network interface modules (NIMs) enable the network to be extended to unlimited distances in unlimited configurations while Modbus NIMs enable any Modbus Slave instrument to be connected for data acquisition and control.
Due to strategic design using the ISO OSI 7-layer design model, Conet is totally compliant with OPC (OLE for process control) and the new Conet OPC server enables most new scada packages to connect directly to any Conet product thus saving the need to write costly drivers and saving considerable commissioning time. Multiple-client conflicts, duplication of configuration are now a thing of the past and other Windows applications such as Excel are directly accessible for monitoring plant floor data.
Alarm annunciation
Driven by the erection of huge new petrochemical plants in the late '70s, the company developed a range of alarm annunciators using revolutionary plug-in cards for easy configuration and maintenance, supplying tens of thousands of alarm points for mission critical applications. These early annunciators evolved into the Omni-16 range which has enjoyed market domination for many years and which continues to be developed to meet changing industry needs.
The display technology of today's annunciators offers either individual incandescent lamp or LED illumination, with laser-printed legends replacing the manually engraved plastic windows of yesteryear. The latest generation also offers a built-in control pushbutton station to save panel space and cost and an integral power supply which saves the external requirement for 24 V d.c.
As an example of setting trends, the latest Omni-16 serial display has an RS232/485 port for use directly with PLCs that perform the input monitoring. To save potentially extensive PLC/DCS programming, the serial display also performs all the annunciation functions, enabling a separate sequence to be allocated to each window. Alarm displays still play a vital role in the modern control room and this new generation of serial display will reduce total installation costs while offering a redundancy strategy for mission critical applications.
The new product range is also available in a true half-size 8 point version and an 8 point micro version which is the same size as a standard panel meter with full annunciator functionality, ideal for MCCs and RTU applications.
Sequential events recording
Omniflex enjoys market leadership in the field of critical events monitoring where field events are time-stamped at source, to provide a chronologically accurate record of fault trips for rapid diagnosis and repair. Various products offer a range of options, from small standalone recorders to large, distributed systems with thousands of I/O timestamped at 1 ms resolution.
Thousands of Omniflex sequence of events recorders are installed in petrochemical, power generation, and manufacturing industries around the world, diligently providing eyes and ears 24 h/day. The SER 260 and Maxiflex RTU products form the backbone of the technology for capturing and timestamping digital events, passing these via Conet to scada systems, or to Omniflex's own Omni-4000 alarm monitoring package.
Remote terminal units (RTUs)
The modular Maxiflex RTU product range represents a significant technological development for a South African company in terms of the product functionality, quality and cost-effectiveness in both local and international markets. With a wide range of I/O modules, CPUs, networking options, special function modules and programming options, Maxiflex has a role to play either as an RTU or as an I/O system in many applications in all industries, where it interfaces easily to scada systems, DCSs, PLCs and other devices.
Power supplies
Omniflex designs and manufactures the Powerterm range of enclosed 24 V d.c. instrument power supplies for which there seems to be an insatiable demand from industry.
Hazardous area products
The Omniterm two-wire transmitters act as both barriers and 4-20 mA transmitters for isolating plant signals and providing the appropriate intrinsically safe protection, thus saving considerably on additional componentry, panel space, termination costs while improving overall system reliability.
Machine monitoring
The Omni-Watch provides a 5-in-1 machine monitoring product that encompasses signal conditioning, alarm relay trip circuits, sequential events recording, alarm annunciation and is networkable using the Conet network. While many of the manufactured products provide machine monitoring capabilities, the Omni-Watch specifically replaces several products that would otherwise be required to fulfil these functions.
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