When AIB Bakery saw a growth of its countrywide franchises last year, it was decided to erect a fully automated flour milling, premix manufacturing and packaging facility in Mount Edgecombe to supply these bakeries with premix.
The entire automation and electrical contract for this green fields project was awarded to NC Automation Engineering, which has been providing quality engineering solutions to a wide range of industries since 1988.
The project involved the full automation of the plant and was split into two systems: the intake and mill section and the finished products section. The intake and mill section includes the wheat intake from multiple road or rail trucks; cleaning and tempering; wheat milling; and bulk flour intake.
The finished products section encompasses recipe batch handling; a bulk out-loading system; the finished product packaging; purchases and sales system; stock control system; maintenance log and reporting; production reporting; and lab test reporting.
"We designed the system around a Windows NT Ethernet network," says Jason Wright, Project Engineer at NC Automation, "with each section being controlled by its own OMRON PLC and Adroit 1500 Tag Agent Server." The active cluster arrangement has two Adroit 4.2 scada PCs communicating to two OMRON PLCs, which gives increased reliability if one of the scadas goes down for any reason. The other scada will take over seamlessly and allow control of both sections without interrupting production or losing any data.
The high-speed communication between the PLCs and Adroit is facilitated via a Klinkmann OMRON Ethernet OPC server. All other computers on the site network have access to both the intranet and the ability to view live scada information via Adroit's remote user interface.
"The new Adroit marshalling agent," continues Wright, "was a huge benefit in a project this big, as we were able to group all signals related to a piece of equipment (running, tripped, start request etc) into one marshalling agent saving on tags and making fault-finding, changing and documentation much easier." The easy-to-use software tools meant that the finished products section was fully commissioned within a week, and the mill and wheat intake section was commissioned in two weeks.
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