Control and supervision system. Mixing of waxes.

Case Study

Project objective

The project consists of updating the production control system. This system was currently operating based on outdated control hardware and with difficulties in finding spare parts in the market.
The system had different independent manufacturing areas with as many existing automatons implemented at different times and without any integrated control strategy. In addition, in the upper layer, there was a custom-developed MES system in charge of supervising that the manufacturing processes were carried out according to the working methods validated by the process department, which was not the most appropriate use of this type of system.

After a preliminary joint study of the situation, the necessary analysis to evaluate the solution that best suited the existing distribution in the factory and based on the resources that the customer already had, the following solutions were proposed:

• Eliminate all PLCs to convert the system into a distributed periphery with a single PLC, in order to unify criteria, standardize installations and centralize use.
• To develop a SCADA system to extract the visualization and plant operation part of the MES system, with the objective that the MES system will only take care of the management and configuration processes.
• Migrate the MES system to a state-of-the-art Web application so that the customer will be able to use it from anywhere in the plant if he has the appropriate privileges.

Technology used

• The system is based on Rockwell hardware and software with CompactLogix L330ER PLC and distributed peripherals from the same manufacturer for both analog and digital inputs/outputs and fast counting cards for the mass meters.
• FTViewSE V10 SCADA server on a virtual machine server.
• FTViewSE physical client on a Windows10 computer with 4 independent displays in the control room and a single display client on a virtualized computer in the refining room.
• Centralized user management on the FTViewSE server.
• OPC server to exchange information between the FTViewSE control system and the higher-level MES system.
• Total and independent control of each of the existing devices in the plant manually from the SCADA, both in terms of operations and alarms and history.