GE Plastics upgrades with Cimplicity

Automation of the extrusion process at the GE Plastics plant at Grangemouth in Scotland has been radically upgraded to provide increased flexibility and control over production.

Automation of the extrusion process at the GE Plastics plant at Grangemouth in Scotland has been radically upgraded to provide the increased flexibility and control over production that is needed to ensure it continues to compete in today's marketplace.

The standardisation of Cimplicity as the preferred Scada package on a plant wide basis, and the focus on GE Fanuc PLCs and Genius I/O, has enabled the company to develop and install the upgraded systems within short plant shutdown periods.

The GE Plastics facility produces a diverse range of ABS-based products mainly for the automotive and electronic industries, including products sold under the names of Cycolac, Geloy and Cycoloy.

It supplies products which offer a wide range of physical properties and colours for customers both within the UK and across Europe.

GE Plastics has owned the plant in Grangemouth for more than 10 years.

As a result of a competitive tendering process, GE Fanuc was called in to assist in the implementation of projects involving GE Fanuc Control Systems, especially in relation to the transfer of resin in powder form from one part of the site to the other, and the control of the final extrusion process.

Zenith Technologies, a GE Fanuc FastTrack Integrator, was subcontracted by GE Fanuc to develop the software for the upgraded systems.

The initial raw material in a liquid state is blended with additives and converted in temperature-controlled vessels to form coagulated particles in a solution.

These particles are separated by centrifuging, before being converted to powder in a stream of hot air in large revolving cylindrical driers.

This powder, which is the basis for the compounding process, is stored on-site in 14 large silos awaiting transport to the final compounding section of the plant.

Transport of the powder takes place via a transfer system, a process that has known hazards.

The physical conditions must be carefully monitored and controlled.

The introduction of Cimplicity software, together with GE Fanuc 90-70 PLC redundancy, proved an ideal solution for this transfer stage.

GE Plastics' Automation Leader, Scott Jaffray, was impressed at the ease with which all the existing individual systems, involving GE Fanuc 90-70s, 90-30s and Genius I/O distributed control systems, together with hardware from third party manufacturers, was networked together across the whole site.

"All that was needed was the addition of a few Ethernet cables around the site to link the individual PLCs and Cimplicity stations", he explained.

"Now we have around 1800 I/Os available through Genius I/O, twelve 90-30s and two GE Fanuc 90-70s.

The final blending and extrusion processes is controlled from three GE Fanuc DisplayStation 2050s, before final bagging and boxing of the pellets via 90-30 control.

Most of the compounding plant and resin transfer system is now under Cimplicity control.

The extrusion lines were recently upgraded, each line taking only two weeks to complete".

Operators were involved in the development of the screen graphics for the new system, and as a result have found it intuitive to use.

As well as the three DisplayStations there are seven other PC workstations on the Cimplicity LAN, plus an SQL server which archives data for future analysis.

Early in 2002 an additional Cimplicity OPC server will provide protected access to the system for production data via the Internet from other GE Fanuc facilities around the world.

The introduction of Cimplicity software provides the control framework that enables the manufacturing process to be responsive to customer demands.

The transport of the correct powder to the correct destination vessel, at the right time, in the right quantities, can now be controlled from one GE Fanuc DisplaySation on the network.

Local control of recipes is planned for the near future.

These enable the final polymer to display different physical properties in terms of strength, impact capability, thermal conductivity and flammability.

Their consistency can be ensured by accurate control and repeatability of the blending and production processes.

Brendan O'Connell, Business Development Manager for Zenith Technologies explained his company's approach to the software development.

"Our adoption of the industry recognised ISA S88.01 standard has provided a structured form of coding.

It has proved extremely beneficial to this project.

For example, once standard modules for one extruder system were developed, the remaining extruders were easier to develop and validate using the same standard modules and structure".

Steve Linehan, Lead Developer for Zenith Technologies, continued, "These S88 standards can be reused and will gradually be applied across the whole plant as systems are updated.

This will facilitate the introduction of Cimplicity Machine Edition at a later stage as this fully supports the S88 programming approach.

It also means that programming maintenance is simplified, as the coding utilises standard control modules and equipment modules.

Once the standard code for one is understood this knowledge can be applied plant wide.

The addition of batch recipes for compounding and colour addition, which will be coded and added at a later stage, will also be simplified by the infrastructure provided through the use of S88".

The ability to adapt production rapidly to meet changing customer demands has focused the need for a powerful control and monitoring software.

As Plant Manager, David Lister, commented, "It is my job to ensure the plant is not only flexible enough to meet the demands of a continually changing portfolio, but that it is able to continue manufacturing successfully 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

The Cimplicity control capabilities and the captured data ensure not only accurate repeatability of resin characteristics, but also optimisation of the manufacturing processes under tight financial control".

Lister added, "As part of a global network of companies, Grangemouth has to continually feed production statistics to sister companies.

Cimplicity enables us to meet GE's 6 sigma quality control standards and allows GE Plastics globally to interrogate our system and get up-to-the-minute data via the web".

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