Development of an automatic subsea blowout preventer stack control system using PLC based SCADA

An extremely reliable remote control system for subsea blowout preventer stack is developed based on the off-the-shelf triple modular redundancy system. To meet a high reliability requirement, various redundancy techniques such as controller redundancy, bus redundancy and network redundancy are used to design the system hardware architecture. The control logic, human–machine interface graphical design and redundant databases are developed by using the off-the-shelf software. A series of experiments were performed in laboratory to test the subsea blowout preventer stack control system. The results showed that the tested subsea blowout preventer functions could be executed successfully. For the faults of programmable logic controllers, discrete input groups and analog input groups, the control system could give correct alarms in the human–machine interface. ► The hardware architecture is developed based on various redundancy techniques. ► The BOP system voting algorithm is designed based on the 2-out-of-3 voting. ► The results show that the developed system and voting algorithm are correct.