Upgrading a Glass Coating Plant

Several years ago, a glass manufacturer was building a new glass coating facility. They wanted to use all the latest technology, especially for the control and monitoring system. It was decided that one of the new MS-Windows based HMI packages, Wonderware, would be used.

The operator interface screens (HMI or Human Machine Interface) were used to monitor every aspect of the coating operation. A particular challenge in this application is that the customer wanted almost all of the points needed for process monitoring displayed at the same time. This resulted in a main display consisting of tiled InTouch screens showing about 1500 points. These screens are displayed almost all of the time

The control system consisted of 3 industrial computers in the main control room and 2 on the manufacturing floor. Each computer ran Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 and WonderWare’s Intouch HMI package. Two large PLCs were responsible for controlling the manufacturing process – one PLC for each of the manufacturing floor PCs – with Ethernet communications between the PC and the PLC. All required data was then distributed to the other PCs via NetDDE. The system performed very well, but over the time many limitations were discovered. The following is a list of the major issues: [...]

Critical Water Operations: Moving Forward with a New Setup

pdfdownload

One of Ireland’s Largest Pharmaceutical Companies Deploys New Thin Client Infrastructure

When it came time to replace old PCs that had been used to manage the critical water operations at one of Ireland’s largest pharmaceutical companies, they called on SolutionsPT and Control & Information Management Ltd (CIM) in Dublin to recommend a new path forward. The customer needed to replace the system they were using to control the clean water input and the wastewater output for all of their facility’s processes. Both were GMP systems, critical to the site’s operation, providing water to the multiple buildings located at the site. [...]