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Chemicals company receives efficiency boost

A GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms UK product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Feb 6, 2008

Proficy Process Systems will be controlling Xinneng Energy's three process lines, producing one million tons of dimethyl ether per year.

Xinneng Energy has implemented GE Fanuc's Proficy Process Systems.

Xinneng Energy is located in Jiangsu Province, Zhangjiagang, China.

Proficy Process Systems is a fully integrated system that provides customers with improved quality and reliability, increased throughput, performance and efficiency and reduced total cost of ownership.

Xinneng Energy produces DME (dimethyl ether), a chemical substance that can be produced from methanol.

The product is used as an aerosol spray propellant, a cryogenic freezing agent when combined with propane and as a clean burning alternative to liquified natural gas, diesel and gasoline.

When Xinneng Energy set up its new plant in Zhangjiagang, the company designed the plant to be able to produce one million tons of DME per year on three production lines.

Proficy Process Systems will be controlling those lines and will take over two lines that they plan to bring on line in 2008.

The foundation of Proficy Process Systems is a contemporary infrastructure offering the benefits of both traditional DCS and PLC/HMI systems, without many of the historic limitations of those approaches.

GE Fanuc's multidisciplined PACSystems controllers provide users with flexibility in their process control systems due to powerful memory and execution rates, as well as the ability to implement multiple control disciplines and programming languages in a single controller.

GE Fanuc's Proficy software is the architecture at the core of Proficy Process Systems, allowing customers to leverage proven technologies such as Proficy HMI/Scada iFIX or Cimplicity, batch, historian and plant applications.

The software provides visibility, analytics and connectivity to deliver robust control, optimisation and performance.

Xinneng Energy has installed Proficy Process Systems in a high-availability architecture.

The system configuration includes Proficy HMI/Scada, Cimplicity technology option for its operator consoles, a system server leveraging Proficy Historian technology and redundant RX7i processors with reflective memory.

By leveraging innovative reflective memory technologies from GE Fanuc Embedded Systems, Proficy Process Systems provides a controller redundancy solution with data synchronisation rates of two gigabits per second.

The architecture includes Ethernet I/O networking with racked-based remote I/O leveraging RX3i high-availability remote I/O stations.

"Proficy Process Systems easily met our requirements of an affordable price and a commitment to fully support us during system installation", said General Manager, Yuantong Ma, from Xinneng Energy.

"And, because this is built on proven technologies, we can count on the stability of the system as well as limited maintenance".

"These features spelled success for us".

Proficy Process Systems features a common global namespace that provides simplified configuration and maintenance for the user.

Based on technology co-developed with GE Energy, objects and tags in the system are defined once and then referenced and used commonly throughout the system.

This global namespace capability can reduce system configuration time by 30%.

The broadcasting technology used by the global namespace between the controllers and the operator consoles provide inherent system redundancy.

The system is also packed with powerful control features including a controller based FAT (factory acceptance test) / SAT (site acceptance test) editor, comprehensive set of function blocks for advanced regulatory control, batch control, sequential control, device control and alarm strategy development.

In addition, user-defined function blocks can be created for the freedom and flexibility to define control algorithms and embed knowledge as necessary.