2009-05-27 - ABB has secured multiple individual contracts with Air Products
ABB has secured multiple individual contracts with Air Products to evolve its European installed base of control systems using the latest ABB technology.
Air Products, which serves customers in industrial, energy, technology and healthcare markets with atmospheric gases, process and speciality gases, has over 24 ABB control systems at its European sites in Israel, Czech Republic and Ireland through to UK, Spain, France and the Netherlands.
Hersham, Surrey is home to Air Products European technical headquarters from where Chris Woodcock, the outgoing global operations manager for plant, instrument and control systems comments: “From the early 1980s to 2000 all the European sites were equipped with ABB Harmony/INFI 90 control systems and even today these remain at the heart of our manufacturing process.”
The Harmony/INFI 90 control systems at Air Products range in size from one PCU node and one human machine interface (HMI) to the largest in the Netherlands which has 42 PCUs and two controller cabinets and redundant communication loops with six HMI servers.
“Air Products has a history of alliance with Bailey Controls and ABB since the early 1980s. As such we have a big installed base across the world. In Europe we have 24 facilities controlled by the Harmony/INFI 90 control system,” says Woodcock.
The programme, which is needed to ensure the operational life of Air Products’ plants, is part of ABB’s recently launched Evolution for Life concept, which considers the best way to evolve the current control system with a periodic review of the status of installed systems and recommendations for evolution planning.
Air Products opted for the Evolution for Life concept because of its multi-million pound investment over the years in the Harmony/INFI 90 control systems and the cost effectiveness of evolving rather than overhauling the entire control infrastructure. “It is at the controller level where most of Air Products’ investment is being made by replacing multifunction controllers with the latest bridge controllers and slave cards,” says Woodcock.
ABB has now received Evolution orders for five projects at different sites including Hull and Stallingborough near Grimsby in the UK and Seville in Spain where System 800xA I/O was added to the Harmony system.
“Evolution is attractive from a central management viewpoint, as it allows us to spread cost over several years. This way we have a regular expenditure in line with our budgets,” says Woodcock.
“ABB has developed a lifecycle management model which tracks the operating life of its systems through four distinct phases. As such, Evolution is looking at systems installed between 1980 and 2000 and identifying those now in the obsolete or limited phase of the lifecycle management model which includes products such as the analogue Master module and multi functional controllers.
“The intention is to extend the life of our plants for up to 15 years and we can achieve this by evolving from Net90 to INFI 90 platform, replacing with bridge controllers.”
Plant loop communications introduced with the Net90 system in the early 1980’s evolved to a fast 10MBaud Infinet/CNet system. The existing modules can be evolved on a node by node basis to the new C-Net modules, providing a stepwise evolution path. The C-Net communication system provides a 20 times throughput increase for critical system information.
“An alternative would have been to keep the installed base up to date or evolve to another platform,” explains Woodcock. “But one attraction of using ABB is that the basic footprint, in terms of I/O and field wiring, remains unchanged and configuration is therefore transportable to the current bridge controllers. ABB has also given us a commitment to maintain the bridge controller until 2015 and if it ceases beyond this, then they will support it as part of the Classic phase of the lifecycle management model.”
“It is important to realise that Evolution is not just about replacing the top level distributed control systems,” says ABB’s Automation Evolution Manager for the UK, Andrew Glover, who has lead the programme with Air Products. “Often the real expenditure is with the controllers. It is important to protect this capital investment. With modern control systems the price of hardware is coming down and Evolution aims to protect the original capital investment and evolve it to the latest components. This will bring the greater return on investment.”
In addition, Air Products has chosen to invest in the ABB Sentinel software management programme. Sentinel provides new software versions for installed control system software; upgrades to newer software products for installed systems; and evolution to ABB’s latest system software technology.
Air Products is also migrating its engineering tools from the Network 90 DOS Cadews Control Configuration software introduced in the late 1980’s, to Composer. Composer is server/client-based product that provides the current system engineering toolset.
Glover comments: "We are now moving on to survey the other sites in conjunction with Air Products management. Both Air Products and ABB see this as a way of retaining years of investment in control software and expertise while ensuring functional systems are available well into 2025 and beyond.”