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The Aktis Plant (Novocherkassk, Rostov Region) produces high quality bottles for the brewing industry. The design of a glass melting furnace with a capacity of 290 tons of glass per day for a new production line was developed by SORG (Germany). However, Aktis refused to use the measuring equipment and automatic control system offered within the project. According to the Aktis specialists, the system was based on the outdated Siemens DR25 controllers. Thus, the company focused on the development of the process control system by themselves.

The basic purpose of the developed process control system is to control the glass melting processes in the furnace and prepare it for further processing in the moulding machines. The functions of the system incorporate the control of operation of five furnace loops regulating the gas and air flow rate, pressure, glass melt and flame direction. Besides, the system maintains 19 temperature loops. The precise control of the glass melt temperature before it is sent to the moulding machines is carried out through the utilization of the M680L multichannel pyrometers (Micron), hence with the pyrometer’s resolution of 0.1°C, the deviation from the set temperature is ±1°C only. The temperature is also measured by means of thermocouples, which monitor 82 points in the furnace.

For the designers, the necessity of using the SCADA system was beyond question. As a result of the comparative analysis of various SCADA systems, the GENESIS32 package (Iconics) was chosen.
The bulk of the hardware of the developed process control system was implemented using the Advantech industrial hardware such as ADAM-5511 microcontrollers, AWS-843 work stations, ADAM-4000 and ADAM-5000 input/output modules, and IPC-622 industrial computers and servers, one of which is equipped with the RAID-500U2 disk array. To enhance reliability, the equipment of the system is housed in the PROLINE cabinets from Schroff.

The key feature of the developed process control system is the communication provided between the work stations and the automated working places with a possibility of viewing the events from any node of the local network. High OPC-server polling speed, reliability of data transmission and ease of operation are ensured. The communication with the remote user was implemented via Internet in order to monitor the processes by the furnace designers in Germany.

All works – from design to setup of the system – were performed by five people within 1.5 years. The operation experience demonstrates the high fault-tolerance and flexibility of the system, but the main thing is that the product quality has been significantly improved. The road that the company took - the development of the process control system by themselves - offered the use of hardware&software meeting today’s requirements, full compliance of the system with the specific features of the plant and the saving of tens of thousands of euros.