DeltaV digital automation system for Persil

The DeltaV digital automation system at Lever Faberge in Warrington provides more flexibility and improved operations and quality, while being installed without any loss of production

Emerson Process Management has installed the latest DeltaV digital automation system at the Lever Faberge plant in Warrington.

The new system replaces an outdated Premis Scada Modicon PLC system that was used to control the Persil product lines for the last 15 years.

The installation was completed during 2004 and covered the slurry, tower and raw materials areas of the plant.

The DeltaV system is a key component of the Emerson innovative, proven PlantWeb digital plant architecture.

Throughout its history, Unilever/Lever has continually adapted its products and introduced technical innovations to meet peoples changing washday needs.

Since it was launched over 90 years ago, Persil has remained one of the UK's favourite brands of washing powder.

Since the Persil brand participates in a high volume, consumer market, Lever Faberge recognised the need to respond quickly to changes in technology and emerging market trends.

The flexibility and adaptability of the DeltaV system enables the company to quickly adjust the existing manufacturing processes or introduce new products as required.

Ian Pickett, Project Manager at Lever Faberge said, "The Warrington plant is undergoing a significant technological change, and the new DeltaV system will bring a huge number of benefits.

These include improved quality of product and processes, reduced waste and rework, enhanced fault finding and configuration, improved reliability and better user interfaces for plant operators and technicians".

Installation of the new system was straightforward and the project was split into phases to run concurrently with other engineering upgrades.

The project was implemented using the Emerson Project Builder Library (PBL).

This comprehensive library of standard modules and tools for DeltaV system users now includes modules from over 200 projects.

By using modules available from the Project Builder Library, design and implementation time were significantly reduced.

The standard functional design (FDL) specification was used for all the PBL modules.

Many of the control modules were generated from Excel based I/O spreadsheets and 80% came from PBL with the remaining 20% being custom written.

The project required that some of the standard PBL graphics were customised to look like the original Emerson RS3 system graphics since the operators were familiar with these from other systems on the site.

Two recipes were written to allow maximum flexibility and Lever Faberge used the Campaign Manager within the DeltaV Batch system, to run the process with the minimum number of operator interactions required.

Campaign Manager software is an easy to use interface that creates, modifies, and executes entire campaigns of batch executions.

It allows users to set up and start campaigns in minutes.

Campaign history is automatically stored in DeltaV Batch Historian without any user configuration required.

Ian Pickett concluded, "We are delighted with the performance of the new DeltaV system, the changeover was smooth and detailed planning and input from the operators early in the design stage ensured that the conversion took place without any loss of production.

The new batch reporting system is providing a wealth of valuable information and the advanced technologies allow the plant graphics to be accessed from any location using the site Intranet.".

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