Ord River Sugar
Australia's newest sugar mill, and the only one built in the past 70 years, is using MacroView for its complete MMI requirements. When CSR and STG designed this mill situated at Ord River in the northern part of Western Australia, they used a totally new mill train concept and they used PLCs for all control in place of the normal DCS system.
Benefits
The implementation of the MacroView - PLC control system has resulted in considerable cost savings over the usual DCS implementation. MacroView's tag structure and inherent group/detail pages ensured that a similar configuration to that of the DCS could be achieved at a much lower cost.
The mill's "untested technology" needed a flexible, scalable control system. MacroView has readily catered for the expanded point count, regular process changes and the increased integration of other systems with a minimal increase in costs. The open architecture has allowed for the easy integration of the weigh-bridge and bin tagging systems.
System Features
The low level control for the plant is obtained through Allen-Bradley series 5 PLCs. These communicate with two MacroView servers operating under Digital Unix on DEC Alpha machines:
The control system uses a dedicated control Ethernet for system communications, and an office LAN for other MacroView terminals.
The system has the following features:
- MacroView V3.0.4 system with 10,000 I/O count, and 8 users.
- Dual redundant servers.
- X-terminal access from laboratory, management and engineering.
- Separate data collection and plant wide TCP/IP LANs.
The system provides the following functions:
- Operators perform all control functions from the MacroView terminals.
- The laboratory system gathers real-time data from on-line flow analysers.
- All plant production and down-time reporting is performed through MacroView.
- Plant engineers and production supervisors have immediate access to real-time plant data.
- Users access MacroView from networked Windows PCs running X-terminal software.
