Movicon System: full SCADA 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 (b=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 b=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."

The Movicon system has two clients, both Panasonic IPCs: the first a 15" terminal in the loading area, and the second, a 12" HMI on the transporter system for local control. It supervises the whole Electrophoretic coating process, including control of transporters, ovens, tank burners, paint pumps and inverter drives; and monitors such key parameters as paint levels and temperatures, and tank and oven temperatures.

The system has web access and is set up to work with iPad and iPhone, as well as standard web browsers, so that anyone can monitor data from the plant from anywhere in the world. It also provides real time and historical trending in Excel format at no additional cost. "The comms options in the Movicon package were incredibly easy to use, and really saved us development time," said Bryan Garbett. "Comms development was just a matter of plugging in, telling the system what was required, and away it went. The openness and flexibility of the SCADA system means that we are able to remotely monitor the system itself, and the PLC and the HMIs directly from Cannock, providing system optimisation where required."

About S&H Systems"

S&H SYSTEMS have over 20 years experience, specialising in the design, manufacture and installation of quality electrical and pneumatic control panels and systems, supplying complete turn-key solutions to user control requirements. S&H have experienced engineers specialising in the areas of both conventional control gear and PLC/SCADA based systems.

About Movicon 11

SCADA"Movicon 11 is the first and the only Scada/HMI platform completely based on XML and Web Services technologies, from Windows Vista to Windows CE and Windows 7. The supreme openness and flexibility of the Movicon architecture makes it the perfect Scada/HMI supervision solution, applicable to any sector in the world of automation.

For more information about Movicon 11, go to www.products4automation.com