Advanced control, data management and visualization in a modular platform solution
A petrochemical plant chose Eurotherm™ E+PLC400 with E+HMI150 touch panel for the automation of a new oil and gas analysis machine.
The machine was designed within the company’s research and development department utilizing their specialist intellectual property, to be scaled up later for factory use in multiple plants. Control system standardization was therefore an important feature, to help achieve repeatable results in global locations.
Oil and gas samples are loaded into a small cylinder oven,where a variety of tests are carried out to analyse their properties using mass spectrometry. The results are used to work out the ideal catalysts for ‘cracking’ individual batches of oil into different products.The temperature of the sample in the oven needs to be precise and the customer has always relied on Eurotherm control to achieve repeatable results. The system being replaced had previously used Eurotherm discrete temperature controllers with a third party programmable logic controller and a master PC. The PC had become out of date, difficult to maintain, and slow to run programs and synchronize with the rest of the equipment.
The customer needed several precision PID control loops, a setpoint programmer capable of at least 50 programs, accurate measurement, repeatable control, and programmable logic. The E+PLC400 modular platform satisfied these requirements due to its multiple precision control loops and setpoint programmers,accurate I/O,and PLC functionality. User password control enabled research and development engineers to limit operator access to process parameters and unique intellectual property within the program. Important process parameters could be recorded by batch in internal memory, for archiving via USB or FTP(file transfer protocol) to a historian server. Process data could then be accessed by quality engineering managers via the enterprise business system (EBS),for global benchmarking across identical machines, and for business reporting purposes
