PROCESS CONTROL
Plan ahead
The demand for greater profits means good process control strategies are essential
to manufacturers and producers in a wide range of sectors. Colin Carter reports
THE CONSTANT drive towards greater
profits has, in the past few years, led to
huge investment in process control
systems and components in fields as
diverse as oil and gas processing to the
food and drink and pharmaceutical
industries.
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There’s no doubt that good process
control strategies are essential to help
manufacturers and producers in all
sectors meet the required demand at the
right price — whether they are
large-scale continuous processing
operations or those producing large
numbers of smaller, discrete, consumable
end products.
Indeed, a recent report by US advisory
group ARC concluded that ‘the worldwide
market for process automation systems is
expected to grow at a compounded
market rate of 9.8 per cent over the next
five years’.
The report also picked out the
pharmaceutical sector (along with
associated biotech industries) as one that
remains strong in its investment, driven
by growth in Asia and other developing
regions.
Greater efficiency, especially in
energy, has been associated with at least
part of this investment. A report
published earlier this year by Frost and
Sullivan, noted that ‘heightened demand
for energy-efficient systems, coupled
with the need to limit production costs,
is boosting demand for electric drives
from food and beverage industry
end-users’.
And there have been many recent
examples of major investment in process
control equipment within the food and
drink and pharmaceutical sectors. At
GE’s Healthcare Life Science division in
Uppsala, Sweden, the company has spent
some £2m on automation systems for the
production of protein separation media.
The system, supplied by ABB, uses the
company’s Industrial T800xA system to
provide control and monitoring of tanks
and reactors, batch control and control
functions for automatic valves, stirrers
and analogue measurement signals for
GE’s production of separation media
based on agarose and dextran.
The production process for Ryvita
crispbread has also recently benefited
from an upgrade in its process control.
Something like a 90 per cent reduction
in manual inputs along with improve-
ments in process efficiency, accuracy,
transparency and reporting are
claimed benefits from the installation
of Citect’s Ampla Manufacturing
Execution System (MES).
This, along with CitectSCADA
Reports, (SCADA stands for supervi-
sory control and data acquisition) acts
as the backbone of the factory’s flexible
‘The global market for process automation
systems is expected to grow at a compounded
rate of 9.8 per cent in the next five years’ ARC
factory-wide reporting system. It was
installed by Silchester Control Systems
with Citect Professional Services to
provide real-time and historical
production data for immediate decision
making without having to collate large
amounts of data before making process
changes.
This means the company is now
able to correct process problems before
it costs large amounts.
The removal of manual inputs
removed one bottleneck. Time was
being wasted entering production
data manually into Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets, all of
continues 44 ➜
the EnGIneeR 21 APRIL–4 MAY 2008
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