Automation Efforts at Air Products
During my second rotation in Air Products & Chemicals' Career Development Program, I led the automation effort at the Los Angeles epoxy plant. Plant production requires many manual processes to be performed by the operators. My responsibilities were focused on implementing new procedures, control strategies, and job aids to replace tedious work processes and optimize production. Many tasks, such adjusting temperature and pressure set points could be easily automated, while others, such as lining up manual valves and pumping raw materials from drums and totes into the reactors could not. It was an incredible experience working with the plant staff to brainstorm new ideas for the plant and see our work have a positive impact on the user experience of the plant staff.
The Gap? Manual work processes lead to inconsistencies in production and tedious tasks.
The Solution? Utilizing Siemens' Batch Controller software to create semi-automated recipes can both improve the efficiency of plant production and eliminate tedious tasks for the plant operators. |
Overall Benefits
Several key features of implementing the batch controller recipes helped to reduce cycle times and make them more consistent:
|
Control Strategy Example: Vacuum Distillation
Many products at the Los Angeles plant require the operators to keep a close eye on the process, and slowly ramp the reactor pressure down to full vacuum, while the reactor heated, as indicated by the black line below. There was often product carryover into the distillation equipment, as indicated by the drops in the green line (reactor weight) and spikes in vapor traffic as shown by the dotted grey line, which led to maintenance and quality issues. We saw an opportunity in this process to significantly reduce the cycle times on these products, improve our product yields, and eliminate tedious tasks for the operators by automatically ramping pressure and temperature set points, using signs of vapor traffic to slow down the process. This new control strategy made a huge positive impact on the plant by automating a long, attention-demanding process to give the operators more freedom to complete other tasks.
Batch Controller Impact
- Observation and feedback from plant staff fueled plant improvements
- Elimination of tedious work practices
- Reduction of in-process samples
- Less wear and tear on plant equipment
- Reduction of product cycle times and improved consistencies
- More predictable cycle times simplifies the scheduling process, helps raw material orders to coincide with the production schedule, and enables the business and marketing teams to make more well-informed promises to customers.