Amcor bottle production adopts Wonderware

HardwarePT has supplied a range of workstations and servers, with interface units to acquire real-time data from the plastics machinery at the Amcor Gresford plant

The manufacturing stakes are high at the Amcor Gresford (Wrexham, North Wales) PET bottle manufacturing plant.

With the capability to manufacture over 10 million containers each day, production quality has to be optimised and all equipment has to be reliable.

Over a two year period Amcor engineers have undertaken a radical overhaul of their manufacturing information system, achieving reliable and accurate production through process insight and durable, fit-for-use hardware.

The Australian owned company takes its leadership from the top, one of the Chairman's stated aims being to "...shift to more product and process technology development to improve value retention".

The team at Amcor were up to this challenge and took stock of the situation that faced them at the Gresford site.

Most of the high volume production at Amcor is automated; at Gresford there was a mix of different generations of machinery, which had varying capability in terms of the process information depending on the type of PLC and HMI which were available.

This information was vital to getting in full control of the processes being done.

However, Amcor decided that this was only a signpost that showed the way that they could go.

For over a year they evaluated various alternatives, and received advice from various suppliers, including their machine vendors, HardwarePT and several system builders.

At the same time the Amcor plant in South Carolina (US) had deployed the Wonderware System Platform as their manufacturing information system.

The dialogue with SolutionsPT, the UK agent for Wonderware software, and HardwarePT, their division responsible for the operating hardware, was thereby thrown into sharp focus.

In considering the entire equipment platform, it was decided that a better ROI could be obtained from plant-wide SCADA.

The decision was made to use HardwarePT-supplied Wonderware InTouch HMI and real-time database Historian.

A second decision was made to undertake the project internally with the help of SolutionsPT training and consultancy.

A third decision was to evaluate the HardwarePT hardware service, this being centred upon the Advantech range of workstations and servers.

The acquisition of data from the plastics machinery in practice is an arduous task - meaningful information requiring fast data access without affecting controller cycle time.

A pilot design had to be developed and tested before the solution could be safely deployed across the whole 28 machines.

The basic scheme developed uses an Advantech Touch Screen PC that acquires data from a tag server; in turn it also supplies the tag server with data from the machine logic controllers.

The ability to do this unobtrusively (to the PLC scan time) and to allow the Touch Screen PCs to have good response needed a special solution.

HardwarePT offered the solution as the Woodhead Applicom PCU2000ETH intelligent communications card: HardwarePT are agents for Woodhead in the UK.

This was mounted in the PC and connected by Ethernet to the PLCs - the same card and the same firmware communicating with both types of logic controllers used on the different generation machines.

The card handles all communication "on-board" and thereby relived the PC from this task - data rates being over 100 words in <100 mS periods, plus an additional 3000 words every 8 seconds.

A novel means of providing extra protection to the shopfloor PCs was conceived by the Amcor team - they mounted the units in the cavity available in the H section steelwork that supports the roof - defence from even the most unpredictable accident!.

In addition to the data available in the logic controllers various data was required from non-intelligent electrical devices: again HardwarePT were able to recommend the hardware to create a solution.

This was to use the Advantech ADAM 5000 modular IO system, which allows particular points in the electrical scheme (both digital and analogue) to be sampled and connected back to the tag server via Ethernet.

An output is also used to switch a machine mounted beacon on to warn of threshold alarm levels being reached.

The Amcor plant is big, and involves large distances for factory networking.

HardwarePT advised that the use of a fibre-optic ring network would provide and answer to the distances involved and additionally would be interference-free and have high availability (through the ring architecture).

HardwarePT recommended and delivered Hirschman equipment, this provides network ring monitoring and 64 RJ45 points of connection for equipment and servers.

The associated server equipment was to be situated in the company main site server room, alongside the Amcor business servers.

A complete new rack was needed to run the various Wonderware components.

A 19inch rack system with 5 Advantech servers, shared screen and keyboard administration system, network hubs and UPS was designed, configured, tested and documented by HardwarePT.

All the basic software was pre-loaded, and properly licensed, ready for the Amcor application.

Prior to dispatch the unit was thoroughly tested with one of the workstation touch screen PCs.

Within the architecture of the server rack due allowance had to be made for the requirement for fail safe switch-over should a problem occur, and high overall availability of the critical system.

Some of the servers (notably the Tag Servers) operate in Master / Slave mode, the InSQL server chassis has a dual power supply system and all the servers have RAID drives.

Protection against mains noise, brown-outs and black-outs is provided by a rack-mounted on-line UPS.

Asked about the experience in production use of the hardware, Stuart Griffiths, Amcor Process Improvement Team Leader, said, "We were initially sceptical about the use of touch screen PCs on the shop floor, however, our experience is that they are extremely durable and are very simple to clean".

Stuart took the new solution to the machine operators and trained them in the use of the system, operator involvement and acceptance being vital to the success of the project.

It was critical that the cycle time of the PLCs was not affected by the data gathering solution.

The machine builder has verified that there is no measurable effect.

Thus the fine resolution data that is a hallmark of real-time information is obtained without any detriment to the process itself.

This fine resolution data is providing machine process insight that was previously unavailable to the Amcor engineers.

The solution to the Amcor requirement has been based upon a collaborative working basis with SolutionsPT.

The in-house resources - deployed mainly upon the application software was assisted by SolutionsPT training and on-site consultancy.

The hardware solution was provided primarily with the help and experience of HardwarePT, who provided a robust solution.

Continuing hardware support and on-site maintenance for Amcor is provided by a support contract with HardwarePT.

The deployment and on-going development of the system is, and will continue to, provide a well-thought-out and effective response from the Amcor Gresford plant staff to the challenge set by their Chairman.

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