A greensand preparation plant, part of a new casting facility for South African Scaw Metals, has been built by Orthos Projects. The project employs a Citect scada system for plant visualisation and operator interfacing.
The Scaw Metals project required Orthos to design and install a new 45 tph greensand preparation plant as part of a complete new casting facility. Greensand plants are used in foundries to produce mould material for the production of metal castings. The term `green' refers to the presence of moisture in the moulding sand. A mould is made from a number of materials - primarily sand. New raw materials are weighed and mixed with recycled sand to provide an ideal `greensand' for moulding. A mixer is used to combine all these materials, typically mixing around four tonnes at a time. Sand cooling is achieved using an Orthos designed and built pre-mixer cooler, which reduces sand temperatures to below 400°C from inlet temperatures in excess of 900°C, while maintaining consistent return sand moisture. Finally, a moulding machine shapes and squeezes the sand, ready for the molten metal to be cast.
Commenting on its choice of scada for this project, Allen Piper, project engineer for Orthos Projects, said: "We have used the Citect product successfully on several of our international foundry projects. It is a fast, easy-to-use system. We like the way it enables us to do just what we need to do, and the way it expands as our customers' requirements grow. A major benefit is that we do not need to purchase separate development licences for CitectSCADA. This reduces our costs substantially, and also helps our clients, who can make changes to their systems without the added cost of a development system."
The scada system provides plant visualisation and operator interfacing across all operations within the sand preparation plant. Installed on two PCs with a secondary system, it provides 20 screens of graphical information. "We can produce impressive results, even for the most demanding applications using Cicode programming." said Piper. "It allows us to do things we can not do with other system. All screen objects are interactive so our operator interface is simple, intuitive and flexible, and because all the graphics were developed with optimisation in mind, our runtime performance is excellent."
The Scaw Metals system is equipped with a modem connection to allow remote observation, fault diagnosis and troubleshooting by Orthos technical staff from anywhere in the world.
For more information contact Niconette du Toit, Citect, +27 (0)11 699 6600, [email protected], www.citect.com
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