The waste incineration plant in Frankfurt Nordweststadt was built in 1965 together with the neighbouring district heating power station. Since then the two facilities have supplied the city district with electricity and district heating. It was decided to convert the plant into a modern waste-fired district heating power station with an annual incineration capacity of up to 525 000 tonnes of household waste. The objective of the operators was to combine the two plants into a single integrated facility that will remain efficient and economical in the future.
The control systems were required to guarantee trouble-free continuous operation of the waste-fired district heating power plant. In addition to this the operators wanted to have access to up-to-date performance, diagnostics and service data at all times, so as to enable inexpensive and simple servicing and maintenance. In order to achieve the desired levels of integration, the plants were to be monitored from a joint control room. The need for modular, distributed and interoperable control became a requirement.
Mitsubishi Electric's powerful System Q automation platform was installed in the neighbouring plants. The modular PLC system allows four CPU modules to be installed on a single backplane. This enabled control of plant processes using high-performance CPUs designed in redundant configurations for critical industrial applications. Local communications take place via a Profibus master module that supports up to 125 field devices. Distributed local stations pre-process and archive the data from the individual plant controllers. PMSXpro was chosen as the central process control system and the flexibility of the automation platform allowed Ethernet connection to the individual automation stations.
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