Assmang’s Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.
System integrator Iritron was contracted by DRA Mineral Projects during the initial 2008 greenfields project to take responsibility for the implementation of the overall scada using the Wonderware System Platform based on ArchestrA technology. The team had to integrate with the DRA personnel responsible for the systems engineering, instrumentation, PLC control system and network design. They were also involved during the commissioning.
Expansion project
For the Khumani expansion project, Assmang again appointed DRA as the managing contractor and Iritron was again employed to implement the extensions to the Wonderware System Platform.
As a certified Wonderware System Platform integrator, Iritron has a long track record with Assmang and extensive knowledge of its standards and requirements. To date, the company has successfully implemented five large Wonderware ArchestrA projects and is currently busy with another four. It is also actively involved in the Beta and systems testing of Wonderware System Platform 3.1 and future releases.
“One of the main advantages of the Wonderware System Platform is its scalability, flexibility and ease of expansion once standards and templates have been developed for a specific implementation,” says group director Johann Pienaar. “In this case, the standards and templates that were developed during the initial phase of the project could be re-used for all the new plant sections.”
In terms of hardware, the existing platform was expanded by adding an additional pair of redundant Application Object Servers and six additional InTouch View Nodes in the new plant sections – King Primary Crushing, 2nd Load-Out Station and the Jig Plant Extension. No other hardware additions were required, as existing servers and networks had more than sufficient spare capacity in processing power and licensing.
In terms of software, the effort put in during the definition and development of the standards and templates during the initial project paid off. “All that was required was to create new instances of the existing templates for motors, valves, conveyors, crushers and screens for each piece of equipment that had to be added,” said Pienaar. “No testing and integration was required, as these templates had already been thoroughly tested. The same applied to the PLC programmes.”
Once the object instances had been created (exports from the FDES instrumentation design software and CSV imports were used to automate this process in both System Platform and in RSLogix5000), the new mimics were created by dragging and dropping the associated object graphics on to the mimic pages and adding the static detail. The graphics and animation form part of the object templates, so no additional configuration or testing was required.
The size of the expansion project is about 50% of the original, but the scada took less than 10% of the original development time thanks to the standards of the underlying ArchestrA technology. This saving will be even more pronounced during commissioning.
“We are thankful for Wonderware’s ArchestrA technology because its developers obviously understood our very real needs and built an environment that allows us to grow painlessly, quickly and to the benefit of our clients,” concludes Pienaar.
For more information contact Johann Pienaar, Iritron, +27 (0)12 349 2919, [email protected], www.iritron.co.za
| Tel: | +27 12 349 2919 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.iritron.co.za |
| Articles: | More information and articles about Iritron |
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version