Brew House Automation System Upgrade
Wunderlich-Malec’s industry-leading skilled application engineers and programmers have installed, maintained, and upgraded brewery control systems for decades for the industry’s largest and newest craft brew companies. Our automation engineers have also achieved recent industry challenges to improve the flexibility and capability of recipe and batch control.
Background & Customer Needs/Requirements
A leading craft brewer needed to replace its existing automation and batch control system for two brewhouses that produce over 300,000 barrels per year in its California brewery. They desired a new system that would improve the flexibility and ease of making recipe and batch program changes while lowering system support costs.
Wunderlich-Malec’s Approach & Solutions
Wunderlich-Malec automation engineers met with the customer to determine the issues with their existing recipe and batch management system. Preliminary functional design criteria were developed in collaboration with the client to incorporate existing field equipment with new world-class components and software in a three-phase project installed with continued beer production.
Phase one integrated and programmed the existing 100,000 field tags and existing plant PLCs into two Rockwell Control Logix 5580E PLC Controllers. A new Stratus edge computing platform and Inductive Automation’s Ignition SCADA and Batch software were configured to provide significantly improved recipe management and batch control compliant to S-88 standards.
Phase two replaced outdated remote I/O racks with new Rockwell remote I/O racks and installed and configured a new self-healing Ethernet DLR EtherNet/IP network to transmit all plant data reliably and securely.
In phase three, obsolete VFD drives were replaced, and the existing beer delivery historian was integrated with the innovative and user-friendly Ignition Perspective platform.
Customer Benefits:
Wunderlich-Malec with proven experience in implementing brewing control systems, provides:
- Open Rockwell & Ignition Platform
- True Customization & Flexibility
- True Batch & Recipe Management
- S-88 Batch, OEE & MES
- Improved Reliability and Maintenance
- Low-cost implementation, ROI in 2-5 years
Customer Benefits
Solution: Experienced Wunderlich-Malec engineers collaborate with customer personnel in replacement system design and installation.
ROI: Ensures customer expectations are achieved, training costs minimized, and operations performance and capabilities improved.
Solution: New state of software replaces outdated and underperforming existing system.
ROI: Improves recipe management and batch control to increase quality and reduce system operating complexity.
Solution: New system and network hardware and firmware replace obsolete, outdated, and costly maintenance equipment.
ROI: Reduces maintenance costs, improves reliability, and eliminates operational shutdowns.
