Client : BHP Billiton - Hillside Aluminium
Duration : 18 Months
Budget : R5,200,000
When the Southern hemisphere's largest aluminium smelter, delivering 685 000 tons of product per annum, decides to replace its entire SCADA system while doing business as usual, there's no room for mistakes. There's even less room for doubt as to the suitability of the chosen replacement and those who will provide it.
With the vision of being the world's leading aluminium smelter, BHP Billiton's Hillside Aluminium facility near Richards Bay in Kwa-Zulu Natal wanted to replace its existing VXL supervisory system. At the same time, any chosen solution needed to be compatible with BHP Billiton's other smelters at Bayside and MOZAL (Mozambique Aluminium).
CSS was chosen for this demanding upgrade and some of the challenges that CSS faced were:
- Managing large volumes of variables - A unified tag naming convention had to be created throughout the solution, which meant that all the tags used by InTouch, Top Server and Wonderware Historian needed to be aligned. As different plant areas were implemented by various contractors, this posed a challenge to create a single standard throughout the plant without redeveloping the PLCs. According to Juan Le Roux (CSS Project Manager), this is the single most important step in a project of this nature. "If standards are clearly defined from the start, less time will be spent later in the project to correct/change current standards," he adds.
- Coordinating with end users - In any corporation it is difficult to reassign skilled staff to a development team for testing, without sacrificing the plant maintenance and support requirements. This requires careful management, a high degree of understanding and collaboration from all involved, as well as the clear definition of roles and responsibilities if the project milestones are to be achieved.
- Development team management - Managing many software developers working in a single user development environment always poses a challenge unless everyone involved can focus on their common goal and their contribution in achieving it.
Derived benefits:
- Improved reporting - allows for sound business decisions based on actual fact rather than guesswork.
- Improved system diagnosis - Previously, automation specialists were unable to drill down to the device level to determine PLC I/O and status. This is now available even to operators who are proactively assisting in reducing plant downtime
- Improved standardisation - Bringing all of Hillside's plant areas onto the new platform has ensured a standard HMI implementation across all three BHP Billiton aluminium smelters, thereby expanding the resource pool skilled to support the applications.
- Open door for future growth - the chosen solutions provide Hillside Aluminium with virtually unlimited potential for visualising, analysing and optimising their entire aluminium smelting process to the benefit of its bottom line
The Hillside site consists of the treatment and logistics, carbon, cast house and substation logical process areas. All of these areas are controlled by more than 230 Allen Bradley PLCs that monitor over 220 000 tags whose processes are being displayed on more than 2 000 InTouch mimic diagrams.
"The previous system, although very stable, was a closed environment to the users and data was only accessible through the physical nodes," says Paul S Venter (Pr Tech Eng), IPS Superintendent at Hillside Aluminium Southern Africa. "With the implementation of the historian, information is now freely available at the users' workstations, allowing for faster response to plant events. The obscurity of the previous system was also overcome with the ability to implement enhancements far more easily than before and therefore delivering business benefit faster and at reduced cost."
"The future scalability of the SCADA implementation was also improved through additional functionality to include plant documentation and loop drawings. This will enhance the fault-finding abilities of maintenance personnel and improve the understanding of operational personnel. Our philosophy is to simplify and adopt rather than adapt. This implementation is aligned with that viewpoint and provides us with a sustainable platform for our SCADA environment."
