Larox, local subsidiary of Finnish pressure filtration equipment company, suppliers to the mining industry, implemented Adroit scada HMI at Manganese Metal Company (MMC) in Nelspruit. The company required that the process and control surrounding their Finnish manufactured filter with built-in PLC system be easily recognisable on the mimic screen.
"We believe Adroit to be the best tool of its sort in South Africa for its integration and power," says Riaan Botha, automations engineer for Larox. "It is easy to engineer, is 50% of the price of conventional systems and has good local support."
The original MMC installation was completed in May 2001, with application development for the filtration system being done in Finland as the reporting system is customised specifically for the filtration system and highly specialised in its genre. The developers underwent training in the UK and Finland to master the Adroit system, which offers international support and training.
The Larox fully automatic pressure filtration system provides a complete solution to plant control, such as pumps and tanks, and comes complete with a PLC. The system uses touch screen technology which MMC found limiting in its application. Larox was called upon to develop remote control systems made visual by CCTV cameras connecting through a reporting server. Scripting facilitated this remote functionality that controls the start/stop functions of 20 motors on a single screen, while recipes provided an easy way to download process parameters to front-end devices and automate routine tasks.
Although essentially sequential in nature, Adroit recipes have the built-in capacity to react to unexpected process deviations by executing process-related conditional branching instructions, thereby achieving a high degree of process safety.
Data is manipulated in the PLC and conveyed via the network, to fit in with the existing PLC programming. The filter's PLC controls the plant and Internet accessibility allows operators and managers to receive realtime information and reports with regard to equipment availability, alarms, tonnages and competitor-sensitive product results, which are password protected.
At the forefront of MMC's requirements was visibility, which the Adroit system provided through its online vector-based drawing editor that comes standard with the package and supports 16 million colours. The system fully supports infinite levels of zoom and pan, as well as user set time base trend windows with scrolling between realtime and historical events. Event viewers and alarm viewers are built into the system and are easily configured.
Developed specifically for Windows NT, Adroit has flexible object-oriented client-server architecture. The filtration system's reporting server consists of a SQL server database for information storage. Information is then manipulated and visualised over the local network via Crystal Reports.
Larox highly recommends the use of remote alarming for the mining industry, as operators cannot always be confined to monitoring the system. Over-alarming, where all events are alarmed, has become common practice amongst some scada systems, resulting in operators receiving a flood of meaningless alarms which are eventually ignored. Adroit provides a structure for configuring alarms that immediately allow for intelligent alarming practises, for example, groups of alarms can be disabled automatically by internal or external events, alarms can be dynamically routed to various peripheral devices depending on process conditions, and alarms can be globally acknowledged.
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| www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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