Project
The Tai Chang Wall's Ice Cream factory in China is producing different kinds of ice cream for the Chinese market. The factory is a subsidiary of the united Li Hua Company. The different types of ice-cream, branded He Lu Xue, have become the famous and favorite products confirmed by the consumers in China Hua Dong area. A couple of years ago, it was decided to modernize the factory in order to increase the production quantities and to extend the number of different types of ice creams under production.
Solution
In order to save huge efforts during installation and operation of the new plant, PROFIBUS was used to interconnect the decentralized Field Devices like I/O, valves and drives with central control system. The complete production line can be monitored and operated from the two operators sitting in the central control room through two operator stations of the PCS system. Two PLCs perform the real time control of the production line. They are also the Master stations of the PROFIBUS-DP Fieldbus and perform the main communication tasks including configuration, monitoring and control. PROFIBUS transports all information from the decentralized Field Devices located in the various sections of the plant to the central controller. The correct function of the mixing section is the most important function of the ice-cream production. Here, numerous pipelines and valves are used to mix up the various raw materials of the ice cream. The valves are controlled by on-site valve control modules from Festo. These control modules support PROFIBUS-DP protocol and are connected to the PROFIBUS-DP bus as Slave stations.
Conclusion
By using PROFIBUS-DP, the Tai Chang Wall's Ice Cream factory could avoid the installation of hundreds of parallel cables to transport the information from the field devices to the central controller. Furthermore the flexibility of the production could be increased and due to the excellent diagnosis capabilities of PROFIBUS, production downtimes could be notably reduced.