| PROJECT: | Matrix Composites & Engineering – Syntactic Manufacturing Plant |
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| CUSTOMER: | Matrix Composites & Engineering |
| DESCRIPTION: | Matrix is a global leader in the manufacture of subsea buoyancy systems for use in the oil & gas industry and the only company of its kind located in the Southern Hemisphere. Matrix are market leaders in syntactic foam materials and technology and have the largest, most technically advanced composites syntactic manufacturing plant in the world. The AU$80 million facility in Henderson, Western Australia is 20,000 square meters and comprises of manufacturing, service, warehousing and houses the sales and administration office. |
| REQUIREMENTS: | KAPP Engineering was commissioned to design and provide a unified control system that linked all three major sections of the plant together in a unified production environment. The original design for the plant included three separate vendor packages utilising ControlLogix PLCs with PanelView Plus Touchscreens operating independent of each other. The three sections of the manufacturing plant included Macrosphere Production, Syntactic Resin Production and Injection & Curing. It was a requirement for the company providing the control system to also provide design input into the electrical design which included PLC selection, I/O Lists, MCC Layouts, Remote Control Panels etc. |
| SOLUTION: | KAPP worked with the three electrical contractors on site (Instelect, Tristar Electrical and EKKA Group) in providing a unified design in regards to the architecture. KAPP also recommended the replacement of the independent PanelView Plus Panels to a full featured CitectSCADA system incorporating redundant servers and distributed clients throughout the facility. As there was a requirement for an integrated control system utilising Safety each section of the plant incorporated a combined safety/process PLC (GuardLogix) with remote I/O panels housing a combination of safety and process I/O.
The control system utilised a combination of Allen-Bradley GuardLogix and ControlLogix PLCs utilising a distributed Point I/O system over Ethernet/IP. The MCC’s utilised a combination of Siemens Simocode starters over Profibus, Allen-Bradley E1+ starters over DeviceNet and Rockwell Powerflex 40 and 753 Variable Speed Drives. KAPP was responsible for the gathering of functional requirements from various on site personnel and translating this information into a format suitable for implementation on a control system. All control system commissioning activities on site, including planning, generation of punch lists, coordination of commissioning works between all electrical contractors as well as the configuration of all VSD’s were also part of the KAPP scope. Due to tight time constraints with project deliverables KAPP had to plan, design, program and execute in an efficient manner where all programming performed was using the advanced features available on the Logix Platform. These included usage of user defined data types (UDT), drive integration and add on instructions (AOI). All sequential operations were programmed in SFC (Sequential Function Chart) for quick and easy diagnostics. |
