Client : Siltech
Duration : 5 Months
Budget : R1,600,000
Silicon Technologies entrusted CSS to design, supply, install and commission a complete new automation solution to control their Furnace A and associated services at their facility in Newcastle. This included the water cooling, batch plant integration and the furnace. Problems they had been experiencing with their existing Siemens and Mitsubishi PLC’s in these areas were that they were outdated and no longer supported. The PLC systems worked as stand-alone stations and not as a complete system. Information for reporting was difficult to obtain and on occasions not at all.
The new system was PLC based with a single processor in the control room with remote I/O in the Furnace MCC, Cooling plant MCC and the A Furnace Batch Plant MCC. The PLC remote station was connected via armored fiber optic cable.
The system is controlled from two identical InTouch SCADA systems which ensure redundancy as both these systems log all system and plant alarms as well as operator events. A data historian InSQL was used to log data which is required for reporting purposes as well as critical plant parameters to allow in depth analysts for plant control and conditions.
The operator interfaces together with the InSQL data historian was housed in the Furnace 'A' control room on a local Ethernet network connected to the plant area network via a router.
Some of the challenges faced on this project were:
- Limited plant drawings were available, with many of them not reflecting the plant, as various undocumented plant modifications had been made since the furnace was first commissioned.
- There were no standards in the way the MCC buckets were wired and modifications had to be done in order to accommodate new plant standards as was designed during this project.
