Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the earth's crust, and with its high strength-to-weight ratio, applications range from the structure of buildings and aeroplanes to the foil in which we wrap and heat food.
Producing consistently high-quality raw aluminium used in the many different objects that we take for granted every day is no simple process. With the help of Cimplicity HMI plant edition software and a tightly integrated network of Series 90-70 and Series 90-30 PLCs from the GE Fanuc Automation division of GE Infrastructure, however, Deschambault's plant is well equipped to meet the challenge.
With nearly $23 billion in revenues and plants in 38 countries, Alcoa is the world's leading producer of primary aluminium, fabricated aluminium, and alumina. Alcoa - Aluminerie de Deschambault, built in 1990 and formerly owned by Alumax, is located in Quebec, Canada. Employing approximately 550 people, Deschambault is a primary metals facility, producing raw aluminium ingots that are sent to transformation facilities and manufactured into various products.
According to Pierre Boutin, application engineer at Alcoa in Deschambault, process control and monitoring was accomplished through a system that was running on DOS and could not be upgraded. The data acquisition was realised through a homemade OpenVMS (VAX) system.
"We needed a system that could be modified with a minimal amount of work," said Boutin.
Company personnel also required greater access to process data. Various users, such as the 30-plus members of the plant's environmental team, collaborate closely but can be located anywhere in the half-mile long plant at any given time. The new system needed to provide a highly secure method of allowing authorised users to access control data from anywhere in the plant, but to change control parameters only from specific locations.
Based on the performance advantages offered by GE Fanuc Automation, Boutin and his colleagues chose a control and monitoring solution featuring Cimplicity software on top of the existing Series 90 PLCs infrastructure.
"Because collaboration is so important in our plant, we really appreciate Cimplicity HMI Plant Edition's solid client-server architecture and remote access through WebView. In addition, GE Fanuc Automation's outstanding local support gave us a level of confidence that really helped in developing this complex control application."
Improvements noted included the following:
* Improved collaboration and troubleshooting via secure remote access.
* Faster identification and resolution of problems through information-rich, user-friendly screens.
* Outstanding local service and support.
* Reduced development time with industry-standard Windows-based tools.
* Higher product quality through better data integration and analysis
* Greater productivity via high-speed networking.
* Elimination of expensive investments in non-upgradable, 'home-grown' system.
Plant-wide automation
Alcoa - Aluminerie de Deschambault - where the alumina is electrolysed to extract the metal it contains - is divided into five process areas that are distributed around the electrolysis area. In each sector, 10 to 15 GE Fanuc Series 90-70 PLCs and a few Series 90-30 PLCs provide redundant control and monitoring. Each of the five Cimplicity projects monitors approximately 10 000 points from the PLCs. Using a star Ethernet topology, the PLCs and operator interfaces with Cimplicity software are connected to a switch in each sector and networked through standard 10Base-T copper connectors.
Each sector is in turn networked via 100 Mbps Ethernet running on fibre-optics to the IT department. The master Cimplicity servers reside in the IT department while the slaves are located in the different sectors. The IT personnel are responsible for the whole system maintenance and development.
Cimplicity HMI Plant Edition takes advantage of the latest Web technologies to provide superior human-machine interface (HMI) and scada functionality through a client/server architecture and open-system design. This configuration provides Alcoa Deschambault with fast, easy integration, and expansion capabilities. Cimplicity WebView allows users to access realtime data remotely through Web browsers on the Cimplicity viewers located throughout the plant. While Cimplicity has built-in user access security features, Alcoa - Aluminerie de Deschambault's IT group added an additional level of security to ensure that, while processes can be viewed by authorised users from all stations, parameters can only be changed from a few designated stations.
"Our IT department invested significant effort in designing this networking architecture to meet our specific needs," Boutin says. "Without a good architecture, this control system, no matter how good its components, would not work."
Working together
"Thanks to the efforts of GE Fanuc Automation division and Alcoa - Aluminerie de Deschambault's IT and process groups, the new control and monitoring system has worked quite well. One of the project's major achievements is the teamwork it facilitates among IT and process control personnel, where much isolation is prevalent in many other enterprises. "The collaboration between these two groups is outstanding, and it plays a major role in the successful operation of our control and monitoring system," Boutin says.
Another aspect of the automation that helps bridge the gap between business and process systems is the tight integration with the company's Oracle database and the resulting datalogging capabilities. "By logging all information to the Oracle database, using an OLAP tool, users can send a query to any master or slave server to see, for example, the status of all alarms in the different sectors," Boutin explains. "This allows users to identify and troubleshoot problems more quickly."
Superior customer service is something that Boutin strives to provide every day. "Our customers are our co-workers in IT and process engineering, and helping them work better is our goal," says Boutin. "If we can do that, we can ensure that this plant continues to be one of Alcoa's best performers."
For more information contact Daniel Coetzee, GE Fanuc Automation, 031 583 2602, daniel.coetzee@gefanuc.com, www.gefanuc.com
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