2005-10-14 - ABB has donated sixteen Freelance 800F control system licenses to the Fachhochschule Hannover (Hanover University of applied sciences). The school's Faculty of Electrical and Computer Technology will use them in its process control and automation technology lab. The software licenses are valued at about 140,000 euro.
Professor Werner Anders, FH Hannover's president, thanked ABB for the generous donation and stressed that in the current era of tight budgets, universities are more and more dependent on help from the business community.
Dieter Henkel, ABB Automation GmbH in Minden's product manager for the Freelance 800F system, presented a voucher for the licenses to the University on September 27, 2005 in Hanover. "This gift underscores the importance of engineering learning centers to ABB," explained Henkel as he outlined what motivated the company to take this step.
Dieter Henkel (middle), product manager at ABB in Minden, hands a voucher for the licenses to Professor Karl-Heinz Niemann (left) and Professor Werner Andres of FH Hannover.
The donated licenses will be used to create sixteen workstations in the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Technology's process control and automation technology lab. The course of study will include a lab in which the students will be asked to design and commission a combustion control system. The lab is part of Professor Karl-Heinz Niemann's course, and he is very pleased: "The donation will allow the students to work on and simulate a real world process control system when they do their assignment." Furthermore, we do not need to purchase any expensive process models added Niemann. "…because the lab assignment no longer requires any hardware." An additional advantage for the would-be engineers is that the assignment will be installed on their laptops, so they can take it home with them and continue to work on it while they are away from the university.
The donated licenses will allow the students to gain practical experience with automating technological processes in a hands-on environment and visualize these processes by means of a control station. The Freelance 800F system supports prevailing Fieldbuses such as PROFIBUS DP, PROFIBUS PA, FOUNDATION Fieldbus and HART. The system also has an FDT interface, which makes it possible to configure field devices directly from within the control system, regardless of manufacturer. The Freelance 800F process control system is primarily used for automating technological processes and has a proven track record the world over in more than 10,000 applications in every sector.