Most common Industrial process

My company was looking to build a demo unit and use a variety of different instrument to show case capabilities. Mostly he wanted to build a situational awareness dashboard on the HMI with KPIs and pretty little graphs and trends... Anyways..

What would be a good process to demo in order to use as many instrument as possible. Better yet, in your opinion, the most common Industrial process? I'm assuming the food and beverage industries take the majority share of plants in the US?

pH neutralization system?
Batch or continuous dosing system?

A boiler wouldn't be a bad candidate. It's common, nontrivial, and may feature a variety of instrumentation.

A batching process is pretty common, we batch all kinds of stuff by volume or weight, and then do different things to the batch, such as cook it, mix it for use in another batch recipe.

Even in a continuous process, we still have lots of batching processes. Where there is a batch tank, then the batch gets transferred to a use tank and is applied to the continuous process through some kind of metering scheme.

A simple water circulation system, with a container filling head at the end. The water system could have pressure, flow rate, tank level, conductivity, pH, sensors to display etc. The filler head would have auto/manual, or even recipes with something as simple as the fill volume. You could show conveyor speed, or product counts. You could build one of these small enough to sit on a bench, if you wanted to. This could be a really fun project.

deanfran said:

A simple water circulation system, with a container filling head at the end. The water system could have pressure, flow rate, tank level, conductivity, pH, sensors to display etc. The filler head would have auto/manual, or even recipes with something as simple as the fill volume. You could show conveyor speed, or product counts. You could build one of these small enough to sit on a bench, if you wanted to. This could be a really fun project.

Click to expand...

I second this. Easily scalable too.

A pump (or two), several flow meters in series, a control valve (or two), open tank level measurement (hydrostatic, cap, ultrasonic, guided wave, discrete switches etc) or closed tank, and some in-line analyzers. The beauty part is that the process fluid is clean, and there are only a few safeguards to implement such as line pressure or high level.

You might find something of interest on this site (it's worth browsing, I did a random choice):


http://controldrawltd.co.uk/presentation3web/process_flow_%28p__i_d%29.html


Kalle

Thanks for the ideas fellas. I presented a few of them to my boss to get his input. He likes the pH naturalization demo idea and gave me a $8,000 budget and a nice little supply of non inventory parts!

Parts I already have:

(2) GF Signet Flow Sensor(Corrected pH volume output, Acid Dosing)
(2) GF Signet 9900 Transmitters
(1) Endress Hauser GWR (Cascade Tank 1)
(1) Flowline Ultrasonic (Cascade Tank 2)
(1) PowerFlex 525 (Circulation and transfer pump from Equalizer to tank 1)
(5) Discrete high level Switches ( (1)EQ, (2) Acid Tanks, (2)Cascade tanks)
(1) 19" Wonderware Panel PC
(1) CompactLogix Processor

And I'm sure I can find random components laying around to build the control panel.


Parts Needed for under $8000

(1) Small 3ph Centrifugal Pump
(3) GF Signet pH sensors (Cascade Tank 1 & 2, and final output pipe)
(3) GF Signet 9900 Transmitters
(1) 30" x 30" Enclosure
(1) Small diaphragm pump (Acid Dosing)


That should do it. Most of the work is going to be in the HMI.. which is what he wants to showcase the most. KPI dashboards (Pump - Average amps, High Peak, Low Peak, Run time and so on) Data logging, and he wants me to figure out view certain data and KPI's on a tablet interface..

Not sure If I need to learn java and right a damn application on the fly or..? I will look into Wonderwares "smart glance" since I'm using a wonderware HMI.

Any input on good KPI's to capture or screenshots of projects you did in the past would be awesome!

KalleOlsen said:

You might find something of interest on this site (it's worth browsing, I did a random choice):


http://controldrawltd.co.uk/presentation3web/process_flow_%28p__i_d%29.html


Kalle

Click to expand...

Neat site. Thanks