Control system upgrade improves adhesive plant

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Dec 10, 2002

When Loctite Ireland decided to upgrade the 15 year-old process control system on its superglue production plant at Ballyfermot, Dublin, it identified a number of key operational requirements.

When Loctite Ireland decided to upgrade the 15 year-old process control system on its cyano-acrylate (superglue) production plant at Ballyfermot, Dublin, it identified a number of key operational requirements which needed to be met.

It wished, naturally, to take advantage of the latest control system developments, including higher processing speeds and power, more open communications and connectivity, better security, and greater levels of management information.

In addition, and crucially, it needed to ensure than any system upgrade was achieved with no loss in production.

The old control system, based on a large number of Eurotherm S6000 controllers at various key points throughout the process 'front end', had been co-ordinated using Eurotherm's proprietary MaxiVis supervisory software.

While this functioned superbly for 15 years, delivering exceptional reliability, and benefiting from high levels of service support from local Eurotherm field engineers, it had become largely obsolete and superseded by more advanced systems.

Reflecting Loctite's satisfaction with the old Eurotherm system and the high levels of on-site support available to support it, company executives opted to upgrade using fully compatible state-of-the-art Eurotherm hardware, which in most cases has been designed to be simply 'hot swappable', new to old.

It was also decided to undertake the upgrade in two distinct stages.

The first stage would involve the replacement of the 'rear end' supervisory system with the latest EurothermSuite software offering, while the interface between the 'back office' system and the 'front end' controllers would be four Eurotherm T940 Process Supervisor 'sequence engines'.

The second and final stage would be the replacement of all S6000 units by dedicated I/O controllers such as Eurotherm's well established 2500 System.

EurothermSuite is a very comprehensive package of proven control and supervisory solutions developed by Eurotherm over 25-years.

It has, because of its total flexibility and common architecture, the capability of handling the localised control needs of production units and plants, as well as the information needs of enterprise management.

It also offers a number of operational benefits, including a single point of configuration, central relational database, data import capabilities, prebuilt functionality and well proven automatic system design capabilities.

Specific strengths of the EurothermSuite installation in this application included much higher levels of reliability, as the system offered full redundancy against the previous single MaxiVis system, open connectivity to the site network (via a suitable router and security checks), and Microsoft connectivity (ActiveX, ODBC etc).

Sequences previously written in Modula high level programmer type language were converted to easily maintainable, sequence flow chart configuration, to IEC1131-1 standards.

By using a dedicated SQL server, high reliability process data logging is possible, with detailed batch reporting.

While not officially certified to FDA standards, the application was configured to virtually the same standards and allows a high level of batch quality control.

Reports may be reviewed and modified using Microsoft Access configuration tools, and ODBC access is possible from other Loctite client software Stage one of the upgrade has now been completed, resulting in a back end system using EurothermSuite and consisting of eight workstations, dual redundant database servers, SQL server and four process supervisor (T940) sequence engines.

Workstations and Servers communicate utilizing Ethernet protocols; the datalinks between plant and supervisory systems are via fibre optic ALIN, Eurotherm's proprietary communications protocol.

This initial activity is just the first part of a two-part project to upgrade the entire site to the latest LIN technology, when S6000 front end instruments are finally replaced.