La Coop Fédérée - Micro Premix Plant
The La Coop Fédérée micro premix plant manufactures medicated and non-medicated premix, mineral and pro-block for animal feed. The premix plant was originally built in 1990 and the control system was updated to an AutoPilot4Feed feed mill control system by DSL Systems in 2002. This provides a highly accurate weighing and batching system with full traceability of all ingredients and production runs.
Materials arrive by train or truck and all are blown into one of 10 silos and bins. Other material arrives in various sizes of bags, even up to one tonne tote sacks. All material deliveries are logged in with their own ‘lot’ number to uniquely identify the load and to provide full traceability of all raw material and products on site. Transfer from silos to blending bins is fully automatic and some materials are ground with a hammer mill at this time. There are 6 main weighers of differing sizes in order to optimise the weighing accuracy. All feeders into the weighers are operated on two speeds, fast and then slow to achieve the best accuracy in the shortest time. Batches are blown up to one of 3 holding bins above the 3 separate mixing lines. All 3 holding bins are all on loadcells which are used to check the weight of the batch prior to mixing. Any discrepancy results in an alarm and the batch is held. After mixing, all batches either go to a one tonne big bag filling station or to individual bagging machines which can fill bags of varying sizes up to 35kg.
The control system
The DSL AutoPilot4Feed control system consists of a main Dell server PC running Windows Server 2003 with 2 RAID disks which are arranged as a mirror image for reliability. A second ‘standby’ PC is identical to the main control PC and may be used to control the plant in case the main ‘control’ PC ever fails. The A further 10 ‘remote’ (client) PCs running Windows XP are used around the plant for operator workstations and maintenance. Three Allen Bradley SLC5/05 PLCs with remote I/O are distributed around the plant and communication to the control PC is via Ethernet for speed. All weighers are connected to Ricelake weigher controllers, 4 weighers per controller and these are connected to the Allen Bradley remote I/O network. There is also a Netgear multiport Ethernet to RS232 convertor to allow the control PC to communicate serially to the big bag weighers, the 3 Chronos Richardson Speedac 7 bagging machines and the inkjet bag printers. All data is held in a Microsoft SQL Server database and since both the control PC and standby PC are identical, SQL Server Replication is used to ensure that all data on the standby PC is kept permanently up-to-date. Thus, should the standby PC ever be needed to run the plant, it is always totally up-to-date and can take over control without any loss of data. A further safeguard is another backup of the data performed automatically every 24 hours.
Hand additives
Hand additions into batches are critical and these are separated into two areas; medicated and non-medicated. In order to maximise accuracy, there are two separate scales for the non-medicated hand additives as additions as low as 2 grams are added on the small scale and as large as 50kgs on the large scale. The operator is prompted for each material and the operator must enter the correct lot number by typing it in.
Many blending bins are topped up by hand from small bags. In order to provide full traceability and prevent mistakes, there are 3 ‘bin filling PC workstations’ for 122 bins. Also, for every bin lid, there is a limit switch which AutoPilot4Feed monitors. Whenever a lid is opened which is incorrect, a loud alarm is sounded which everyone can hear so it is impossible to ignore. AutoPilot4Feed produces a report which predicts which bins will run out of material in the next 8 hours and the operator uses this to decide which bins to re-fill.
Full integration with the office computer system
The control system is connected to the company-wide network and formulations are transferred automatically from head office in Montréal. The formulations not only contain all the individual ingredients, they also contain the density (so that the correct mixer is used), the required bag size, cross contamination code and texture.
Comprehensive Logging and Reporting
The package, Crystal Reports, is provided which is a flexible reporting tool. Since all data is held in a standard database (SQL Server), Crystal Reports can be used to access any of the data including long term records, stocks, bin levels, alarms, formulae, audits and so on. AutoPilot4Feed comes with about 40 standard reports but these can be amended and new reports added. Whenever a new report is generated it is easy to add it into the menu system for everyone to use.
Installation
Installation was performed over two long weekends and went very successfully. CFQ have been very pleased with the reliability and the features of the system with only minor problems since installation. AutoPilot4Feed is fully user-configurable and CFQ’s own engineer, Eric Lapalme, has been to DSL for training and is now able to modify the system himself, saving time and expense. Eric Morel, CFQ Project Manager says the system was delivered on time with all the required functionality. The schedule of the project was tight but DSL’s engineers achieved the timescales. The AutoPilot4Feed feed mill control system by DSL Systems is a flexible system that can easily be updated when there are modifications to the plant.
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