Students Expand Knowledge With Custom Hybrid Engine and Ignition Platform

The students on the Monash High Powered Rocketry Team set their aim high — 10,000 feet high.

The multidisciplinary student-led Monash High Powered Rocketry (MHPR) team from Monash University in Melbourne develops, designs, and launches sounding rockets. The students focus on a range of disciplines across avionics, payload, propulsion, flight systems, dynamics, aerostructures, business, finance, and safety.

Over two years, as part of Project Zenith, the students in MHPR have designed and manufactured the Solaris MkII hybrid rocket engine, targeting a 10,000-foot apogee on its launch. Recently, the MHPR team took Project Zenith across the globe to Midland, Texas for the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC). Throughout the rocket’s development and during the competition, MHPR leveraged Ignition — the industrial integration platform for SCADA, HMI, IIoT, and more — to ensure a successful launch.

Held Back by Rigidity

Project Zenith is MHPR’s most ambitious project to date, challenging the students to develop a hybrid engine from scratch. This necessitated a complex array of hardware and software requirements, leading the team to branch out into new technologies for fluid systems and air brakes. 

While MHPR made great strides with constructing the engine and circuit boards, progress was initially much slower for the digital aspects of the project. Originally, Solaris MkII’s software used an entirely text-based HTTP model, which the team found both unpredictable and inflexible. “We were using more general web development technologies such as Svelte or TypeScript, and we found that these systems were very rigid,” said Rachit Tamrakar, a student on the MHPR avionics team. “We couldn’t change things, and it was quite hard to make things exactly how we wanted them.”

This lack of flexibility stymied Project Zenith as a whole. “It was quite a clunky system that required a lot of effort to make small changes with, which is something when you’re developing a new engine is going to happen a lot as you add new systems and change new systems,” said Tom Russell, Team Lead at MHPR.

Switching to Ignition

Understanding that the team required a more robust solution for the competition, Ben McDonald, an Avionics Engineer at MHPR, contacted Inductive Automation’s Educational Engagement Program, which provides free Ignition licenses to qualifying educational institutions as a means to introduce students to industrial controls. “I had familiarity with how well maintained and developed the software was, so I knew that if I could implement this with our current system, that we would have a very reliable performance system,” he said.

“I was very excited when Ben contacted Inductive Automation’s education team because I had worked with Ignition previously in the past, and I know that it would have been such a step up from the traditional web development that we were doing before,” Tamrakar said. “I could see that it had huge potential.”

Ignition allowed MHPR to iterate their system faster and more reliably as Project Zenith progressed. “When we started this project two years ago, we had no idea what we were doing. And through all of our iterations, we slowly developed what has become an incredibly complex and reliable system,” said Jack Bradley, Avionics Engineer at MHPR.

Ignition’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface meant that students could start working with the platform after minimal training. And for more advanced functions, the students found Ignition’s capability to embed Python code and act as an MQTT client to be extremely valuable. For offboard systems, MHPR is pushing data through topics into an MQTT broker as the main form of communication on the ground. From there, each MQTT topic is fed back into Ignition for data management.

Tamrakar’s role, in particular, was to develop the Ignition backend that controls the rocket’s offboard systems. “Ignition made it very, very simple,” he said. “All I needed to do was write a few MQTT topics and write a few endpoints for those, and then Ben could just go into Ignition, into the Perspective designer, and attach some buttons, and all of a sudden we could test our backends within seconds.” 

“Ignition makes interacting with our system extremely easy. It gives us a very user-friendly frontend and a very modular frontend as well, which has been very important as the project has adapted over time,” said Bradley.

This adaptability became vital as the students emphasised safety and reliability when implementing the Ignition system. “We’re controlling what the entire rocket rides on, literally,” said Tamrakar.

“Our engine inherently is a very unsafe system where we’re working with nitrous oxide that is 50-60 bars on some days,” said McDonald. The team needed to be confident that when they triggered a valve, it would, in fact, open or close without delay. “Once we switched over to Ignition, we never had any sort of delay, and the safety of the system inherently improved a lot.”

Launch Day

The actual launch during competition is always a high-stress situation. “In terms of visualisation, I aimed to develop a frontend that was very simple to use on the day,” said McDonald. He opted to include all launch control functionality on a single screen to minimise unnecessary navigation. “Then from that screen, we’ve got all of our individual devices and other screens where you could debug and do testing on the functionality, prelaunch.”

Ignition’s Perspective Module allowed MHPR to visualise all of their data streams for critical measurements like pressure, temperature, and thrust as the engine was firing. “We wanted to see all these things in real time, and Ignition really enabled that,” said Tamrakar.

“What impressed me the most with Ignition was how easy it was to sort of get that vision of what we wanted in the UI actually on a screen,” said Russell. “As a launch operations lead, my job was to sort of monitor the control team as well as the pad team to make sure things were going right and quick glances at the screen was always part of my job. Having that information displayed in the best way possible was really important.”

MHPR’s Ignition system made great use of embedded web pages, allowing the team to remain on one screen while viewing another page as it displayed their data logging in real time. “We have a database that has a web viewer, and we were able to embed that web viewer as well as our IP cams footage within pages in our Ignition project,” explained Tamrakar. “For us, that was a really powerful feature.”

In 2025, MHPR won the Jim Furfaro Award for Technical Excellence at IREC and finished second in the student-researched and developed (SRAD) 10,000-foot category at IREC.

“Actually seeing it launch and watching everything work as we intended, it was an amazing feeling. It was incredible to watch,” said Tamrakar. “Seeing our rocket launch for the first time in Bendigo was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. And then again, when we went to America and seeing it launch using the systems that we built, using Ignition, using all of our knowledge, being in the team, seeing all that hard work culminate and pay off in this one launch was one of the best experiences of my life.”

Further Refinements, Fresh Perspectives

The ease of iterability meant that MHPR could design the system with future students in mind. “We’re not trying to stop at Solaris MkII,” said Tamrakar. “We want to go to Solaris MkIII, Solaris MkIV.”

Ignition’s data collection capabilities have proved crucial for the team as they continue to improve the rocket and launch setup. “As a student team, a lot of what we do is research,” said Bradley. “And being able to collect high-frequency data is extremely important for analysing the performance of our engines.”

As Project Zenith progresses, the students in MHPR plan to leverage Ignition’s inherent interoperability, since the platform is built on open standards. “We’ve got really big plans to integrate all of our other ground systems from different projects from the onboard rocket that also have separate ground stations. We have a vision where we can integrate all of these different systems into just this one ground station, make that ground station redundant, and then our team has a very robust platform that we can keep building on as the team moves forward,” said McDonald.

The MHPR team is excited to take the knowledge they’ve gained from Project Zenith outside of the classroom as well. “Using Ignition has kind of changed my perspective on what types of engineering work there really is out in the field. It’s not always just programming or routing a PCB. There’s engineering positions where you’re doing visualisation of data,” said McDonald. “Ignition has opened my eyes to a very different field of engineering compared to what we do usually in classes at university.”

As Russell summed it up, “Our vision is about pushing the boundaries of space technologies in Australia and inspiring a passion in the next generation.”

Monash High Powered Rocketry (MHPR) is a student team at Monash University revolutionising student rocketry in Australia by developing innovative space technologies, fostering collaboration, and igniting passion in future generations through outreach. With a team of over 100 members, MHPR actively competes in both the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) and Australian Universities Rocket Competition (AURC). The design and manufacturing of almost all components of these rockets are done in-house by students, including all airframe components and many flight computers.

BHP’s award-winning Ignition SCADA implementation improved their Alarm Management System by bringing all the information to one ‘Single Pane of Glass’

This project is a high-performance human-machine interface (HMI) which assists
technicians at BHP’s Technology Remote Operations Centre (TROC) for Minerals
Australia in monitoring and managing the status of critical technology infrastructure
and components across the operations.

BHP’s TROC HMI project built with Ignition SCADA won a prestigious Firebrand
award at the recent Ignition Community Conference (ICC).

We congratulate the BHP team on this landmark project built by BHP for BHP,

What was the problem?

BHP Technology Remote Operations Centre (TROC) operates 24×7 supporting critical
technology across assets in Australia to prevent and minimise safety and production
impacts to the assets.

Prior to HMI, BHP TROC technicians performed this process manually, monitoring
thousands of uncontextualized emails, manual and automated phone calls, or simply
through “eyes on glass,” monitoring multiple application screens and logs.
A missed alert or delayed response could result in the shutdown or evacuation of an
entire operation, or worse, someone being injured.

And the solution?  Ignition SCADA

After extensive research, BHP defined “what good looks like.”
TROC technicians receiving ONLY critical data, presented in near-real time, in a way
that provides actionable context, displayed on a single pane of glass.

Developing the solution was complex, as BHP’s Australian operations consist of:

• 30+ sites
• 20+ network domains
• Tens of thousands of devices
• Hundreds of thousands of data-monitoring points

For the software backbone of HMI, BHP chose Ignition SCADA.
Ignition provides the means to present information in a modern browser interface,
provides a zero-install environment, is mobile-device-friendly, and allows BHP to present
all the information to the TROC technicians in a familiar SCADA environment.
Importantly, Ignition’s an off-the-shelf solution with traditional SCADA functionality,
alongside modern IoT connectivity options.
The development team has spanned BHP’s Australian assets to collect device health
and process data via the existing OSI PI historian infrastructure, collecting and contextualizing 1.1 million data points every few seconds.

This data is automatically mapped back to data models, while bringing in ServiceNow
data on current incidents, problems, and changes, to provide more context in an
alarm situation. BHP also hooks into predictive Splunk alerts and consolidates this along with all the asset
downtime into Ignition alarms.

BHP monitors:

• 800+ servers
• 1,400+ switches
• 79 GE PLCs
• 257 AB PLCs
• Many services and applications

Most of the data models built for these devices in Ignition are scripted and automated,
so BHP can quickly deploy at scale and provide the ability to refresh when new devices
are added or removed from the landscape.

As iControls Pty Ltd is the Australian Distributor of Ignition SCADA we provide continued technical support in BHP’s development and deployment of this solution.

See Below Video that Showcases the BHP  Implementation that was Showcased at the ICC 2021 Conference.

Perspective, Edge and MQTT Bring Significant Cost Savings

INDUSTRY: Oil & Gas

PRESENTED BY: Trent Boudreaux

Trent is the Director of Technical Services for The Integration Group of Americas. Trent has led enterprise SCADA projects for the last 13 years in the oil & gas industry including production, processing, and pipeline systems for some of the largest producers in the U.S. Trent has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Louisiana. His current focus includes edge computing, IIoT, and mobile.

CREATED BY: The Integration Group of Americas (TIGA)

TIGA is a systems integration and engineering services company that enables companies to leverage new and well-established technologies to solve industrial operational problems. TIGA specialises in three engines that drive our global economy: energy, water, and data.

PROJECT FOR: WaterBridge

WaterBridge provides best-in-class long-term water management solutions for the E&P industry through its integrated pipeline networks for produced water transportation, disposal, recycling, and supply. As E&P companies have shifted from single-well to pad drilling, significant additional permanent water infrastructure is required to efficiently and safely transport higher and more concentrated volumes of produced water. WaterBridge provides the essential takeaway, disposal, and recycling capacity necessary to accommodate the rapid growth of produced water and reuse requirements critical to the oil and gas industry.

PROJECT SCOPE

• Tags: 90,000 on Main Gateway and more than 2,500 on each Edge Gateway
• Screens: 73 Perspective views
• Clients: More than 90 unique users and average of 15 simultaneous users
• Alarms: Approx. 20 alarms per hour
• Devices: More than 60 Allen Bradley CompactLogix, AutoPilot Pro, Allen Bradley MicroLogix, Rosemount EC3 Flow Computers
• Architectures: Hub & Spoke (Scale Out, IIoT, Enterprise, Edge Panel, Redundancy, and Cloud-Based Architecture)
• Databases: 4 Azure Managed SQL Databases (Ignition Metadata DB, Ignition History DB, Regulatory DB, AUTOSOL Config Database) and 3 Replicated Azure Managed SQL Databases for business use (Ignition metadata DB, Ignition history DB, Regulatory DB)
• Historical data logged: 125,000 historical tags and 600,000 records per month

PROJECT OVERVIEW

WaterBridge, a midstream water management company, was not receiving the level of reliability and support that it needed with its existing control and SCADA system. TIGA performed a phase-one engineering assessment to determine the level of effort required to replace WaterBridge’s control and SCADA systems to an updated IIoT platform. Through the assessment, TIGA was able to define a migration path to allow WaterBridge to gain flexibility, consistent visibility into its operations, ownership of its control and SCADA systems, and significant cost savings over the life of the systems. Ignition Edge with MQTT was implemented at 65 saltwater disposal facilities, and Ignition Perspective was used for mobile devices.

By leveraging Ignition, TIGA was able to deliver a system that WaterBridge needed in order to easily control operations. Allowing WaterBridge ownership of its control and SCADA systems has removed the need for the closed proprietary system. Operational processes are more efficient due to increased visibility for key stakeholders who can now make decisions in real time. Centralising the data has helped not only operations but has also enabled a digital transformation. The collection of data is stored in one location and serves over 30 WaterBridge customers with the ability to monitor all aspects of the midstream allocation.

PROBLEM:

WaterBridge had proprietary control and SCADA systems that were outdated and unable to meet the demands associated with the growth of WaterBridge’s operations. WaterBridge required a system that would allow it to better leverage emerging technologies in addition to gaining deeper insights into the operational data through an industry-accepted enterprise SCADA system and control system.

Within the last few years, WaterBridge has experienced rapid growth. During that time, unreliability and stability issues within its control and SCADA systems became increasingly apparent. The system was unable to handle systematic changes that WaterBridge needed to run its operations at maximum efficiency. The cost of WaterBridge’s legacy solution was scaling dramatically, since it did not have direct ownership of the control and SCADA systems.

SOLUTION:

TIGA and WaterBridge worked together to architect a new design using the latest industry-standard PLCs and SCADA technologies. WaterBridge engaged TIGA to perform a functional assessment and design of a new SCADA and control system. This assessment and functional design included using Ignition in the enterprise, Ignition Edge at each facility, and Perspective as the user interface.

The Ignition SCADA platform enabled the use of edge computing for the aggregation of data via Ignition’s Allen Bradley and Modbus OPC-UA drivers, the transport of high-frequency data with optimised bandwidth usage via Cirrus Link Solutions’ MQTT modules for Ignition, and the local visualisation and control HMI with Ignition Edge Panel.

Following a successful pilot project, “Project Independence” was kicked off by WaterBridge’s Charles Lame and TIGA to successfully replace the legacy proprietary field equipment and deploy Ignition with MQTT and Sparkplug B at each facility. TIGA’s implementation of the SCADA system focused on application architecture, ancillary and data integration subsystems, UI/UX design and development, external interfaces, and local HMI uplift.

TIGA worked with WaterBridge to deploy an enterprise Ignition SCADA system within Microsoft Azure cloud-hosted infrastructure using Ignition’s Enterprise Administration Module. The system was architected by using MQTT and Sparkplug B with redundant Cirrus Link Chariot brokers. This enabled WaterBridge to realize a substantial increase in data resolution and data quality using the Sparkplug B report-by-exception and store-and-forward.

At each of the 65 saltwater disposal facilities, Ignition Edge with Allen Bradley, Modbus, and MQTT Transmission Modules are being used for data collection. The system is collecting data from more than 2,000 tags per second, per facility, through this architecture.

WaterBridge and TIGA took a mobile-first approach to design and implement the visualisation components of the Ignition Perspective system. This strategy allowed TIGA to workshop and sketch the Ignition Perspective UI and work toward the visualisations for all other user experiences from mobile phones to high-resolution monitors.

TIGA worked with WaterBridge to repurpose the existing OnLogic IPC at each facility and integrate Ignition Edge Panel for the local HMI. TIGA’s team developed a process to make the most current Texas RRC Lease and Drilling Permit data available for selection at the edge devices used for truck unloading. Local HMI screens were developed to find and correct missing information on truck tickets created at those edge devices. Using the corrected truck ticket information and metered piped volumes, TIGA developed a process to allocate skim oil sales and report them on the Texas RRC P18 form. Ignition Edge Panel solutions deployed at each facility are centrally managed from the enterprise Ignition system in Azure using the Enterprise Application Module.

RESULT:

This project allowed WaterBridge and TIGA to implement an IIoT-enabled Ignition SCADA system within a hosted Microsoft Azure infrastructure using the Ignition Enterprise Administration Module, Ignition Perspective for user interface, Ignition Edge Panel and Edge MQTT with Cirrus Link’s Chariot broker while maintaining control and safety systems at each location. This system enables a higher resolution of data, better user experience through Perspective, and a manageable, open SCADA system.

The solution is made successful with the use of the following modules:

• Enterprise Administration Module
• Perspective Module for SCADA screens
• Ignition Edge Panel + Edge MQTT + Edge Enterprise
• Cirrus Link Chariot broker
• MQTT Transmission, Engine, and Recorder modules
• AUTOSOL Communications Manager

Bringing together the online sales ordering process directly through to the factory floor.

YourCoffee is Australia’s leading specialty contract coffee roaster. Partnering with businesses of all sizes, from boutique coffee operators to national retailers they deliver marketing-driven coffee products and services.

With a custom-built coffee roasting facility in Melbourne designed to provide large-scale, flexible roasting services with unrivaled quality, YourCoffee engaged with Ignition to streamline their processes, with the aim of bringing their client base closer to the production process.

Comprising of a complete vertically integrated specialty coffee sourcing and roasting facility, with 50 tonnes per week production capacity and automated packing on-site, YourCoffee provides a scalable production and private label solution. The team at YourCofee were looking for a way to increase the plant’s flexibility, in order to satisfy a broad range of customer demands with short lead times and a focus on reducing waste.

YourCoffee decided to install Ignition in the plant so that they could create a bespoke design tailored to their needs. They found the advantage of Ignition software over others on the market, was the ownership they were given on how the systems were presented and how they interact with it. Ignition’s unlimited licensing gave YourCoffee the freedom to build whatever they needed. There are no additional costs for adding new projects, tags, clients, or users.
The Ignition solution that was implemented at Your Coffee allowed them to short cut the online sales process from Shopify and bring the sales orders directly through to the production system without any manual involvement.

Jeremy Irwin, operations manager at YourCoffee describes the benefits Ignition has provided to the business: “We know that even when we are at peak capacity the system can manage the large volumes through the factory. We also know exactly what is being ordered, and exactly what we need to roast each time so it doesn’t matter how busy the plant is we have a non-variable in ignition because it presents the correct information for us every time.”
He goes on to describe the increase in data accessibility “The staff at Your Coffee have become empowered to fix situations that arise, at any time I can grab my mobile phone and check where the process is at, have control over the process, which means that it’s easy to access and easy to use for everyone involved.”

The implementation of Ignition to YourCoffee resulted in faster processing times, less wastage and has provided a stepping stone to reach a full industry 4.0 solution.

Applying Ignition technologies allows Australian companies to maintain their competitive edge and helps to promote and sustain Australian manufacturing, to find out more contact www.icontrols.com.au