From utility substations to plastics, steel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage and nascent alternative energy applications, NovaTech customers provide the energy and materials the world depends on, and they in turn rely on the superior return on investment and outstanding support that NovaTech provides.

Agile and responsive, NovaTech competes and wins projects in industries dominated by much larger competitors on the strength of its innovative engineering and customer-centric culture.

A History of Innovation

The three product brands - Bitronics® electrical measurement and recording products, the D/3® Distributed Control System, and the Orion Substation Automation Platform - are considered best-in-class measurement, communication and control technologies. The inheritors to more than a century of continuous innovation, these NovaTech products are used extensively by electrical utilities and Fortune 500 manufacturers around the world.

Bitronics

The NovaTech division today known as Bitronics began in 1908 as the Bethlehem, PA instrumentation group of Roller-Smith, supplying government, telecoms and mining operations with highly reliable precision measurement devices.

In those days, the instruments incorporated hand‑marked dials, copper induction coils, jeweled bearings, and steel cases.  Manufacturing was labor intensive and involved precision techniques carried out by skilled craftspersons.  This craft-based manufacturing created a pride in quality workmanship that still resonates in our products today.

As technology advanced, Bitronics began to design and manufacture the first all-electronic digital power meters rugged enough for continuous use in the electric utility substation. Acceptance of the new digital instruments in the traditionally analog world of the utility substation was accelerated by the performance and quality of Bitronics' utility-grade products. By the early 1990s, Bitronics instruments had 40% of the U.S. utility substation measurement market, being specified 4-to-1 over the nearest competitor. Today, Bitronics products are recognized within the electric utilities for their outstanding reliability, ease of use, and advanced capabilities. For example, the Bitronics 70 Series IEDs (the first to incorporate IEC 61850 Ethernet protocol) are being used to tackle control challenges in the wind-saturated Denmark power grid. The measurement and control practices being pioneered there will be directly applicable to the Smart Grid as renewable and distributed generation expands worldwide.

Orion

The Orion Substation Automation Platform was developed by engineers in the Lenexa, KS, division of NovaTech, leveraging their decades of experience in integrating and automating utility substations, gas pipelines, and industrial applications. The lessons learned over hundreds of such projects led NovaTech engineers to design a convergent communications and automation platform that could perform the functions of multiple substation devices - Remote Terminal Units, Chart Recorders, Cyber Secure Communications Gateways, Distribution Automation Controllers, Protective Relay Communications Processors and more - into a single, easily configured box.

Today Orion is the leading flexible substation automation platform in the U.S. market, seamlessly integrating many many manufacturers' measurement, protection, and SCADA products. Orion handles the communications, Cyber Security, and automation functions for substations in a significant portion of the U.S. wind market, the largest solar PV installation in Hawaii, and at hundreds of U.S. utilities who have adopted the platform in the last few years. In industrial automation settings, Orion serves as a bridge to connect "islands of automation" with Advanced Process Control and energy management systems.

D/3 DCS

The Process Automation division of NovaTech LLC (originally known as Electronic Modules Corporation and later incorporated into Texas Instruments and GSE Systems) developed the D/3 Distributed Control System in 1981, winning the prestigious Vaaler Award for their fusion of sequential and batch automation into the first hybrid, plant-wide DCS control system using a Sequence and Batch Language (SABL®) for application development. The D/3's flexibility, power, and reliability led to its rapid adoption within the process control industry by many of the world's leading manufacturers, who still rely on the system today. Its architecture heavily influenced the design of competitors' subsequent DCS offerings.

Today the D/3 is trusted to perform in industries including biofuels, bioplastics, brewing, agricultural processing, nuclear fuels, pharmaceuticals, power generation, chemicals, steel and other heavy industries. Recent innovations include a patented process visualization and documentation suite, a 1-to-6 I/O redundancy technique that allows a single 8000 Series I/O unit to back up six others, and Online Upgrades that allow software upgrades without process interruptions.

Advanced Process Control (from partner firm Aspentech), combined with the Bitronics and Orion products, allow NovaTech process customers to reduce their energy costs and environmental footprint. NovaTech's continually expanding applications engineering expertise, training courses, operator simulators, and track record of successful projects are allowing customers to rely on NovaTech more as a consultative engineering partner than just as a vendor.