Working with Siemens Digital Industries, GEO incorporated Siemens’ Simatic S7 control system and WinCC, and a mixture of other technology solutions, to optimise how it makes its monomer products by managing processing equipment such as the reactor, vacuum system, temperature control unit, and charging systems.
Within 12 months of commissioning it, GEO had reached production capacity and needed to scale up, explains GEO IE&C engineer Tony Short. “In order to meet demand, we needed to increase what we could produce. The key drivers for us were to scale up production, increase control, and have the ability to develop and optimise recipes in house rather than bring in third parties at a vast expense.”
Fortunately, he adds, “The building was built with room to install an additional plant and these rooms were left vacant until the need arose.” As a result the S2 Production Plant was built alongside the original S1 plant.
As the plant handles inventories of high-hazard chemicals, GEO also needed to ensure the highest level of safety controls, alarms and interlocks. After initially considering upgrading its control unit, Siemens DI proposed to deploy a complete solution based on integrated hardware and software, reconfiguring the plant and embedding the blending process into the new design.
Commissioned in 2020, the solution includes an automation package utilising the Simatic PCS 7 distributed control system, Sinamics variable speed drives, Simocode motor starters and Sirius low voltage, Scalance network devices, and a range of process instrumentation for flow (electromagnetic, variable area, differential and coriolis), level, pressure, and temperature.
Simatic PCS 7 was selected as the automation platform by GEO because it was scalable in its deployment, flexible in operation and provides the ability to be able to optimise recipes and develop new recipes in a controlled and standardised manner. Another key selection criterion was Siemens’ track record in process industry applications.
Visualisation of the production process has also been a major benefit, says Short. “With the Simatic PCS 7, we get full visualisation of the whole system, which means things like tuning valves was a straightforward task. This reduced commissioning time and made us operationally efficient sooner. It has meant qualification batches were much quicker and easier to produce.”
Key to the successful deployment has been the training and support. The solution included Sitrain PCS 7 training course for GEO’s managers and bespoke training for 15 operators and maintenance control technicians. The partnership also includes a three-year service contract and remote connection to the plant.
“Given Covid and the challenges of the pandemic this remote connection has been invaluable and helped ensure the plant has continued to run seamlessly,” the engineer concludes.