The technology and instrumentation used by the chemical industry to convert raw materials into a final product require the knowledge and experience that is the foundation of Wunderlich-Malec’s process control expertise. Our work in the chemical industry has included both batch and continuous manufacturing processes that have utilized basic sequential control, as well as complex control algorithms with statistical analysis, data collection and logging. Our experience includes a wide variety of manufacturing processes in many different environments, including:

• Extreme temperature and humidity conditions
• Hazardous atmospheres–Class I, II and III, Division 1 and 2
• Cleanrooms–Class 100 to Class 100,000

PROJECT: A specialty product and detergent manufacturer’s pilot plant and manufacturing facility needed to reduce changeover time between production runs and pilot runs.

CHALLENGE: The existing DCS system required configuration changes to make a changeover possible; the customer wanted to give operators the ability to cut during a changeover.

SOLUTION: Wunderlich-Malec supplemented the control system with a PLC, increased the number of PID loop controls and installed a new HMI and SCADA system. We then configured the SCADA system to log production and pilot run data. This data was used to create a maintenance schedule and provided the process engineers with the historical run-time information necessary to refine the pilot production runs.

RESULT: Changeover became an operator-initiated transition through the HMI, which maximized production run times and minimized changeover time to pilot runs.