MOVICON 11 SCADA PROVIDES SUPERVISORY CONTROL & MONITORING AT LARGEST BIOMASS POWER STATION IN ITALY

The largest agricultural biomass power station in Italy was commissioned recently, with supervisory control and monitoring provided by Progea Movicon 11 SCADA. Paul Hurst, MD of Products4Automation, Movicon’s UK distributor, describes the new system and outlines the benefits of using Movicon SCADA in sustainable energy generation projects.

“The new Bondeno power plant is built on area covering nine hectares, and has four 1 MWe power stations, providing an overall 4 MWe of installed power to supply around 10,000 households each year. It runs on biogas, which is produced by biological fermentation of products such as maize, sorghum and wheat. The biogas is 55% part Methane, which is sufficient to feed the four SINCRO 1000 cogeneration motors installed at the station.

In many ways biogas is the ideal fuel, due to its neutral CO2 effect on the atmosphere. This is because the amount of CO2 emitted by the biogas is equal to the amount absorbed by plants (or consumed by animals indirectly when feeding on plant vegetation). The use of biogas therefore becomes part of the plant carbon cycle, without adding to the greenhouse warming effect, unlike other types of fossil fuels.

The complexity of the biogas production process meant that choice of plant automation system was crucial. The system is essential for monitoring, efficient management and maintenance, as well as analysing historical performance system data. The choice of system was made by CPL Concordia, project engineers for the Bondeno plant. CPL Concordia is a multi-utility co-operative group, which has over 30-years experience in the renewable energy sector.

Alessio Vaccari, the head of the CPL’s Congeneration software department, was tasked with finding the best system. He carried out a technical survey to evaluate the most suitable software platform to use. Finally, he chose Movicon 11 Scada/HMI technology, which was judged as being ideal for achieving CPL Concordia’s set objectives.

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P4A’S MOVICON SYSTEM PROVIDES FULL SCADA ‘FOR PRICE OF HMI’ ON NEW STATE-OF-THE-ART-PLATING PLANT

Products4Automation’s low cost Movicon SCADA has been chosen to control a new state-of-the-art Electrophoretic Coating plant, recently installed by the Foleshill Plating Company of Coventry. The project, to control and monitor all aspects of the new plant, including logging and trending in Excel format, web access monitoring by IPad and IPhone and email alarming, was supplied by P4A Movicon system integrator, S&H Systems of Cannock.

The Foleshill Plating Company is one of the UK’s top plating and metal finishing companies, serving key industry sectors, such as automotive. Key to the company’s success are its reputation for quality, and the fact that it offers very fast lead times: the latter as a result of investment in fully automated process lines that run 24- hours a day.

Recently, Foleshill has added to its automated lines with a new Electrophoretic Coating plant. This has been installed to provide high quality finishes across larger components that were previously beyond the company’s capacity. The principal purpose of this coating is anti-corrosion protection; it also provides an excellent surface preparation for subsequent elements of the paint system.

The project to automate, control and monitor the new coating plant was awarded to S&H Systems a company with over 20- years experience in the design, project management and installation of electrical works and control systems, including electrical control panel design and manufacture.

The S&H engineer in charge of the project was Bryan Garbett. He takes up the story. “The Foleshill project involved us in supplying a PLC control system with a supervisory data acquisition and control system (SCADA), and eight inverter drives to control the motors that drive the transporters for component transfer. We decided on an Allen Bradley PLC and drives; but when we came to specify and price the SCADA system, the costs for the most well known packages were prohibitive. To overcome this problem, we asked Paul Hurst at P4A for an equivalent quote, using Movicon SCADA.

This turned out to be around 40% below our original quotations; effectively giving us a full SCADA package for the price of an HMI- based system from competitive vendors. What’s more, the Movicon system was incredibly easy to use, and offered much, much more for the price. It included an integrated Historian, and trending functions, really excellent communications functions – and, crucially, had no development costs.”

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