A customer of ours out of the Houston area wanted a new control system for one of their labs, so we went over to take a look at what they needed. The system would need to control and monitor two reactors, agitators, temperatures, pressure, oil circulators, pumps, pipe heater and communications to two different scales. Piece of cake for ACI. We selected some of their spare control equipment and ordered the rest of what we needed to begin building the panel. Fabrication began two weeks later after all the material had arrived.
Once the panel layout was completed, we begin wire terminations. During which time it was determined that a couple of devices that we had initially included were not needed so those were removed. Next, we started building the interface cables. There were 11 different cables needed for this system to function.
Now that we had the control panel and all the cables built, it was time for the HMI and control program to be completed. Below is a sample of the HMI control overview.
Once everything was completed we headed over to the customers lab and installed the panel. Connected all the cables and made any field terminations that were needed, such as incoming power and the thermocouple wires. Next came the startup which went smoothly. We were in and out within a day with the system ready for them to test. Any support needed after installation was done remotely.
The only issue we had to overcome with this system was the communications to the two different scales used in the process. Once that was worked out and tested, everything else just fell into place. From the time we went to the lab to check out the job initially to control panel installed and ready for testing was about 2 months.