Services

MDR ASSOCIATES LIMITED works across the full arc of a control project, from the first control philosophy to the handover pack. Six channels of practice carry that work, and every one of them ends in something you can test, measure or maintain.

Control System Design

Control system design begins long before a controller is chosen. We start with the physics and the sequence: what the plant must do, in what order, with what interlocks, and how it behaves when a sensor lies or a valve sticks. From that understanding we develop the control philosophy, the loop sheets, the cause and effect matrix and the signal list. Each document is written to be read by an integrator who has never met us and who should not have to guess.

We are deliberately neutral about brands. A design that only works with one vendor is a design that has quietly become a procurement dependency, so we keep the architecture portable and specify interfaces rather than part numbers wherever we can. Redundancy, fail-safe direction and manual fallback are decided at this stage and written down, because a choice made on paper is far cheaper to change than a choice made in a panel. The output of this service is a set of drawings and tables that can be priced, built and reviewed without ambiguity.

Real-Time Software

Real-time software is the discipline that turns a control philosophy into behaviour that repeats, cycle after cycle, under load and under fault. Our engineers write deterministic code for embedded controllers, soft PLC targets and edge devices, and we treat timing as a requirement with a number attached. Cycle time, deadline margin, jitter and watchdog strategy are specified, instrumented and measured rather than assumed.

We favour code that a maintenance engineer can follow years later: small modules, explicit state machines, guarded interfaces and logs that show what actually happened. Where a system must communicate with supervisory layers we design the fieldbus and the handshake together, so that a dropped message degrades gracefully instead of freezing the machine. Testing is not an afterthought but a structured sequence of unit, integration and endurance runs, including the fault injections that prove the failure paths also behave.

Safety Instrumented Systems

A safety instrumented system exists to act when everything else has failed, so its design deserves a stricter standard than the rest of the plant. We define the safety functions, assign each a target integrity level, and separate protection from regulation wherever the standard requires independence. Sensors, logic and final elements are selected and configured with the required diagnostics, and every assumption is recorded in a safety requirements specification.

Proof testing is where many safety systems quietly fail, so we treat it as a design deliverable. Each function gets a written test method, an interval and a record sheet, so that the claimed integrity can be demonstrated rather than merely asserted. We also examine the common cause failures that undermine redundant channels, and we are candid when a proposed architecture cannot honestly reach the integrity level being claimed. Catching that on paper is the cheapest safety improvement a project will ever make.

Data Acquisition Platforms

Acquisition platforms live or die by the honesty of their timing. We build chains that carry a measurement from the transducer to the historian with its time stamp intact, its engineering units explicit and its provenance clear. Signal conditioning, sample rates, anti-alias filtering and buffering are chosen against the frequencies that actually matter, not against a default setting inherited from an old project.

We design for the awkward moments too: a network drop that must not lose samples, a clock that must not drift across days, a storage layer that must survive a reorganisation of the plant network. Dashboards and trend views are built on the same trusted data, so that a vibration signature or a thermal excursion can be read months later with the same confidence as on the day it was recorded. When the data is trustworthy, maintenance decisions stop being arguments about opinion.

Commissioning Support

Commissioning is the moment a design meets reality, and it is rarely gentle. We join the site team for the loop checks, the first movements and the staged start-up, watching the real edges arrive and tuning the behaviour on live data. Because we know the signal references, a fault found at two in the morning can be traced back to a specific drawing instead of being investigated from scratch in the dark.

Our role is to shorten the path between symptom and cause. We keep a running record of every issue, its root cause and its resolution, so that the same lesson is not relearned on the next machine. We also manage the handover itself: punch lists are tracked to closure, as-built notes are captured while they are fresh, and the operating team receives a walk through of the system as it was finally built, not as it was originally drawn.

Technical Documentation

Documentation is the part of a project that outlives everyone who built it, and it is too often assembled in a hurry at the end. We write it as the work proceeds: manuals, as-built drawings, calibration records, maintenance schedules and fault-finding guides that speak plainly to the person holding the multimeter. Where a system has quirks, we explain them rather than hiding them, because an undocumented quirk becomes a future outage.

The result is a handover pack that lets a new engineer, an external contractor or a future project team work safely on the plant without a phone call to a former employee. Good documentation is not administration; it is the mechanism by which hard won knowledge becomes an asset of the business rather than a memory inside one person. We regard it as a core service, not a courtesy.

How a project runs with MDR ASSOCIATES LIMITED

Every engagement follows the same spine, although the detail changes with the plant. The point of the spine is that each stage produces something the next stage can rely on, so nothing is assumed and nothing is left dangling into commissioning.

Scope and listen

We visit, ask about the process, the constraints and the risks, and agree what success will look like in measurable terms.

Design openly

We produce the philosophy, loop sheets and signal lists, and we review them with you before a single component is specified.

Build and prove

Software and safety functions are tested on the bench against an explicit plan, including the faults that must be survivable.

Commission and hand over

We support the live start, close the punch list and deliver a documentation pack that lets your team run the plant with confidence.

Not sure which channel you need?

Most clients arrive with a symptom rather than a service name. Describe the machine, the behaviour that troubles you and the timescale you are working to, and we will suggest the most useful first step, even if that step is simply a review of what already exists.

Talk to our engineers