Written by Tony Deane, Technical Manager- Control Systems
The Client
Major food manufacturer in the North East of England.
The Application
New Thermon heat tracing units fitted to the fermenter processing plant. The collected values needed to be fed into the existing ABB DCS system.
The Problem
The trace heating of temperature zone monitoring element was added to the scope of works after the original ABB DCS design and implementation had been completed. The Thermon heat tracing units have Profibus interfaces and can be seen as slaves by a Profibus master.
Unfortunately, the ABB DCS system was not originally intended to have a Profibus interface and this is the only way the Thermon units can communicate to a third party. The existing DCS could not be economically retrofitted with a Profibus interface.
The new Profibus hardware had to fit into the existing DCS I/O marshalling racks and integrate seamlessly with the DCS for operator monitoring and long term logging of trace heating temperature zones important to the production process.
A cost effective solution was called for to solve this issue.
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