How do you build a new, state-of-the-art distributed control system for a food processing plant and customer design team that often are physically inaccessible to you due to COVID-driven travel restrictions?
That was the challenge facing Cybertrol Engineering, an automation and integration specialist, when in 2020 they started work on a greenfield DCS project with Merit Functional Foods, which specializes in the manufacture of plant-based proteins. Merit’s pea- and canola-based products are used in products that include protein powders such as nutrition bars and meat, egg and dairy alternatives.
Early in 2020, to take advantage of the booming market in plant-based proteins, Merit decided to expand operations by building a new production facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with operations to launch in Q1 2021. As part of the project, Merit brought Cybertrol Engineering on board to design and implement the plant DCS. Two members of the Cybertrol team—Tim Barthel, vice president of automation solutions, and John Tertin, director of solutions engineering—were on hand at this week’s Rockwell Automation Process Solutions User Group (PSUG) meeting to discuss project successes and review the challenges unique to this installation.
Barthel and Tertin began the presentation with a review of the design criteria mapped out collaboratively by Merit and the Cybertrol team. Among the key criteria were balancing short-term software and hardware costs with longer-term factors such as vendor support, ease of use for users unfamiliar with DCS and related technologies, and expandability over time to grow and evolve with the needs of the plant. Some of the questions raised by the planning teams included:
- What system and software would the maintenance staff be comfortable with for day-to-day support?
- What type of long-term expansion likely will be required?
- Who are the local vendors for system support, component replacement, and overall service?
The biggest question to answer, said Barthel, was “how do you manage that installation? If you pick a low budget software that’s difficult to support, your plant can’t operate. You want robustness, you want reliability.”
Also, securing local support for the DCS installation was especially important, to help the project teams overcome the logistical challenges associated with commissioning a new plant in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Remote support was incredibly important for us at the onset of this project,” said Tertin, explaining that the Cybertrol team, based in the U.S., were not always able to visit in person with Merit’s Canadian project team.
The system selected by the Merit/Cybertrol team was the Rockwell Automation PlantPAx DCS, which was determined would help Merit meet key market challenges through plantwide control and optimization and which features a modular architecture that is both stable and secure in order to help the plant evolve and scale over time. Cybertrol is a long-time Gold Solution Partner of Rockwell Automation, and has extensive experience with the design and installation of PlantPAx systems.
Also, both Merit and Cybertrol would have the advantage of being able to leverage Rockwell Automation’s extended partner network, especially at times when the Cybertrol team were unable to travel outside the United States. In those situations, said Barthel, “there was another local integrator that would help when we couldn’t come across the border,” and a local Rockwell Automation representative in Canada would help identify these crucial local support resources.
Finally, the Merit Functional Foods maintenance staff were already trained to support Rockwell Automation hardware and the PlantPAx system, so they were comfortable providing day-to-day support.
Throughout the project design phase, the Cybertrol team used Rockwell Automation’s Integrated Architecture builder to assist Merit in choosing the best hardware options for the DCS, reviewing everything with Rockwell Automation’s PlantPAx experts multiple times as well as with the Merit team. “We wanted to make sure that the software that would connect to the SCADA system would fit with everything,” said Tertin, resulting in a common software architecture so that end users could see what each piece of OEM equipment is doing.
For the physical layout of the system, Tertin mentioned that the location of I/O panels as well as future I/O needs were planned at the start of the project, to ensure that space and power requirements were appropriate. He added that safety zones were defined up front to make sure that expensive rework would not be required.
A partial list of software components selected for this project included:
- Studio 5000 PLC programming software;
- VMware vSphere ESXi for virtual machine management and availability;
- Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Historian SE and Live Data Interface for time-series data acquisition and storage, with trends and reporting access available from the HMI; and
- Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk View SE and ThinManager to make access to factory floor information readily available across both operator consoles and mobile devices.
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The Cybertrol team also developed standards for Merit to use, including controller and HMI templates, in order to ensure consistent screen layout, navigation, object usage and programming methodology. The standards also needed to be intuitive, to help overcome any potential operator turnover challenges, as well as deliver remote access to operational data in a plant designed to run 24/7.
“Data is very important to this customer, and I don’t think we disappointed,” said Tertin.
Finally, the security built into the system served two purposes: to keep bad actors out, and to enable remote users to log in securely and easily. “There are two layers of security: one’s area-based and one’s user-based, so you don’t have people who are unfamiliar or untrained causing unplanned downtime,” observed Tertin. “Both of those layers are supported in PlantPAx and are important to consider.”
Additional security measures included deploying Radius two-factor authentication, an STM relay to enable real-time alerts from manufacturing systems without compromising security, and a VPN for remote connectivity, all in alignment with IEC and NIST security standards. Area-based and user-based security also were applied to ThinManager specifically, in order to manage clients and view operations remotely with the right security access.
The new Merit plant has been operational since earlier this year and includes more than 13 different PLCs, yet new hires are able to learn the system quickly. Also, the ability of maintenance teams to work on any process with common PlantPAx standards, whether time-based or cycle-based, helps improve plant uptime.
