Product category:
Automation software
News Release from: GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms UK | Subject: Cimplicity HMI
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 08 February 2000
Cimplicity HMI provide Potash Refinery
control
How sophisticated data mining techniques use CIMPLICITY HMI captured data to provide energy savings in a drying process.
Boulby in Cleveland, on the coast of the North East of England, is the site of the UK's only potash mining and mineral processing facility Covering around 80 acres of surface installations, which includes the processing plant, it produces potash (potassium chloride) for use as a fertiliser
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 17 Feb 2000 at 8.00am (UK)
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Cleveland Potash Limited (CPL) chose software based on GE Fanuc CIMPLICITY HMI and GE Fanuc Series 90T PLCs to monitor and control the processes in the refinery from a PC in the Main Control Room.
The company is currently utilising data mining techniques, using data captured by the CIMPLICITY HMI software, to optimise the energy consumption in the potash drying process.
It also plans to extend the HMI monitoring and control to other areas of the plant to include underground machinery, and to optimise shipment of the final product from its site on nearby Teesside.
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The potash operation Up to 12,000 tonnes of ore per day are mined at depths around 1,100m below ground and below the nearby sea-bed.
The ore is hoisted to the surface and then refined to produce a dry, pure potash product.
A dedicated rail track is used to transport the final product to Teesside for shipment to its customers, with exported product leaving from the company's own deep-water terminal, Teesdock.
The Boulby site operates continuously.
Operations underground include drilling, blasting, heli-mining, conveying and hoisting of ore.
In the refinery, ore is conveyed, crushed in rod and ball mills and the potash separated from the unwanted minerals (mainly clay and salt) by froth flotation and crystallisation.
Three oil fired rotary dryers heat the flotation product.
The dry powder is then distributed as it is, or compacted and granulated.
The choice of final product is determined by how CPL's customers utilise the potash.
Other machinery in the processing plant include large pumps, centrifuges, agitators, a large refrigeration system (for crystallisation) and air compressors.
The monitoring and control system for ore processing In recent years, CPL has invested in an improved process monitoring and control infrastructure, including a process-wide PLC and SCADA system.
The whole refining operation can now be monitored and controlled by one operator in the central control room.
The various operations, including conveyors, milling, flotation, drying, compaction and crystallisation, can be individually selected on the large dual-screen system.
Temperatures, pressures, mass flow rates, etc., are immediately readable and constantly change on screen in real-time.
Trending graphs and historical data are also readily available on screen at the click of a mouse.
The system utilises two PCs in the Main Plant Control Room which run PROSCON under Windows NT.
PROSCON is an HMI system developed by Outokumpu, a Finnish company which specialises in mineral processing installations.
At the heart of PROSCON is GE Fanuc's CIMPLICITY HMI software.
The PROSCON package provides easy installation and visualisation of motor and PID control.
The two control PCs provide redundancy by operating continuously and duplicating the system control.
If one PC fails, the other will continue the process without interruption.
This also enables testing to take place on one system without disturbing the 24 hour / day operation.
In total, around 80 PID controllers, for valves, conveyor speed control, tank levels, temperature, density, flow-rate, pressure, etc., and 150 motors are connected to the network.
Analyser routines in the PROSCON software also facilitate the display of 30 assay variables indicating the potash content at various stages during the refining process.
Three GE Fanuc 90T-70 PLCs connected to the PCs on the plant-wide fibre-optic Ethernet network control the I/O throughout the refinery.
There are currently around 700 digital and 400 analogue I/Os on the system.
Areas of the plant that have been upgraded recently utilise four Series 90T-30 PLCs and GE Fanuc Genius I/O on Genius Fieldbus networks, and it is planned to gradually replace all the hardwired I/O onto similar bus systems.
The Ethernet links throughout the site enable interrogation from other sites such as in the Engineering Management and I.T.
offices, and from three plant workstations.
The system can also be interrogated via modem from a PC away from the plant.
Developing data mining techniques Mineral processing is always associated with high energy requirements.
The electrical demand at Boulby is around 25 MW during normal working.
The annual cost of electricity currently exceeds £5million.
Heavy fuel oil is also used to raise steam and to fire the rotary dryers.
The average demand for this heat is 38 MW (thermal) and the annual cost some £1.5 million.
Energy costs are expected to rise in the near future.
CPL is continually seeking to optimise performance which will reduce operating costs and environmental emissions and improve product throughput, quality and yield.
One of the benefits of CIMPLICITY HMI monitoring and control is that data from the process is now readily available in massive volumes.
Simon Lambert, Electrical and Control Coordinator at CPL, explained, "The data contains useful knowledge about process operations, throughput, yield, emission quantities, and the reasons for variations in energy efficiency.
However, identifying key factors can be difficult, especially as the interactions between process variables are usually complex.
Many factors influence performance and data volumes are huge.
Until recently, software tools to permit the analysis of such masses of data have not been readily available, resulting in missed opportunities to reduce energy consumption and increase profitability." Data mining techniques are now being used at Boulby to improve both process performance and energy efficiency, by unlocking the wealth of information that exists in databases.
These techniques have been widely applied in commerce, to analyse, for example, financial, insurance, and marketing data.
Analysing process performance is relatively new.
It involves techniques that learn from data, in particular finding patterns in data automatically.
Data mining applied to the drying process The drying process is also a high electricity user.
Of the three rotary kiln dryers at CPL, two are supplied with wet product (at about 6% by weight of moisture) via centrifuges.
However, the feed moisture content varies, depending on feed consistency and centrifuge efficiency.
The dryer shell is 3metres in diameter and 20metres in length and rotates at approximately 8 rpm.
The dryers totally dry the solids that are continuously fed to them at around 60 tonnes per hour.
Control of product temperature is achieved indirectly.
The heat is supplied from the combustion of heavy fuel oil, just sufficient to vaporise the product water content.
The oil-firing rate is adjusted by means of a PID controller, to maintain an exhaust gas temperature set-point at around 200ºC.
This set-point is adjusted manually to produce a satisfactory product temperature, generally well in excess of that required to drive off the moisture, so that it provides an adequate temperature for the downstream compaction process.
The dryer instrumentation provides measurements that are sampled every second by the SCADA system to develop per minute averages.
Data is logged to a remote SQL server using the HDA routines in CIMPLICITY HMI.
This includes six minute, one hour, shift, day, weekly, and monthly averages.
According to Lambert, the use of data mining techniques to build real-time predictive models from this wealth of operational data has already enabled the development of improved process control strategies in the main dryers, and has resulted in significant savings in energy usage.
Future development of predictive models and extension of monitoring and control A system has now been set in place that will archive all available data from the process control system on a weekly basis.
This involved a relatively simple configuration of the SCADA system to log and carry out over 400 measurements and 100 calculations per minute.
The per minute averages are stored for a period of one week before rolling over.
This will provide site wide information of all operations for future data mining projects.
"We are currently expanding the monitoring and control systems," Lambert continued.
"We are developing an integrated alarm system throughout the processing plant that will trigger different audible sounds and voice instructions to alert the controller or technician to the area in which a potential problem is detected. Request a free brochure from GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms UK ...
We also have plans to link in to the network, the conveyors from underground, our site storage systems and our ship loading procedures.".
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