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March 1st 2008

Follmann & Co, manufacturer of chemical products for paper and textile finishing, has installed a highly flexible cooling, storage and filling plant for adhesives that can be reconfigured, expanded and relocated at any time.

Confident that the demanding control and process visualisation tasks could be performed without a conventional centralised process control system, the company opted for compact PLCs and HMI control terminals from Mitsubishi Electric.

The control technology had to be expandable, flexible, failure-resistant, easy-to-operate and provide transparent visualisation of the processes. Management also wanted to have fast, reliable access to key process and production data.

The plant is divided into several control zones, each controlled by a Melsec FX2N compact controller.

Detailed information is provided by MAC E900T and MAC E910T HMIs, while F-series drives control the motors.

With 600 to 1000 signals being processed, it was clear that a single compact controller was not going to be able to handle this task on its own – hence the distributed design of the control system. This helped with another key requirement which was that every system should be quickly reconfigurable and expandable.

The reactor controller has an Ethernet communications module that connects the PLC network to the company's office computer network. This makes it easy to exchange data with the system and perform diagnostics and programming from any computer in the network.

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