Moyses

hmiman - It seems that I woke up one day and realized that I am the leader. I am the most senior and most experienced in my plant. Our corporate guys don't care about controls, per se. I talk to my boss and he makes me realize that the vision is supposed to come from me. Holy cow, man, I don't have vision. Couple that with some issues I have with delegation (especially to contractors) and I have some freaking out to do. I will endeavor to overcome all of this. Thanks for your comments. I know the importance of under promising and over delivering, it's one of my mantras. I hear you on the S88 compliance. PLC_Man_Stan - I read that book. There is good information there. Our code does most of the things that the book recommends. Recipes outside of PLC, units taking ownership of resources until released, checking inventory levels before ingredient delivery, batch suspension (pause), etc. BobLfoot - Oftentimes I'm a one man show. Sometimes that's good, other times not so much. I'll get through the next few hurdles and keep the goals of standardization and implementation of S88 compliance close in mind. I also realize that I won't be able to do it myself and at minimal cost no matter how bad I want to. Thanks.

Hello, Our batch process was installed and started up in 1996. Originally it was composed of a SLC504 with 3 ten slot chassis in the main panel, a RIO jaguar scale head for mix tank weigh scales, an RIO ten slot chassis on one channel in a remote panel, and another RIO channel with two more ten slot chassis. Our original HMI was a custom VB application. We batched in 3 10000 gallon mix tanks and transferred our finished goods to 4 hold tanks to supply two packaging lines. The recipes reside in a MSAccess database. The batch would sequence through each step as target weight was reached. Add a bunch of years and growth and it became a bohemoth, more mix tanks, hold tanks, ingredients in the tank farm, etc. We transitioned to RSView 32 for the HMI application some years ago mostly because the VB application took a great deal of work to maintain and modify.We've added several sub-processes along the way that are composed of multiple components that have to be mixed with a high shear process. We have added several ingredients that are slurries instead of our original powder adds. We kept adding RIO and upgrading to newer and larger processors. This January we transitioned to the Control Logix platform. We just added a small rack with the processor and DHRIO modules to use our SLC field I/O as RIO. The code was converted, not re-written. The old SLC datatables are now data arrays of the same int type as before. The limitations that we had with the SLC were only partially overcome with the conversion since the datatypes currently emulate the SLC that we had. As I said, the original batching control system allowed one ingredient to be added at a time and since we used weigh scales, multiple adds didn't make much sense anyway. Now I have mass flowmeters on the majority of ingredients and multiple ingredient adds that make sense chemically can be accomplished. The code through the years has lost the standard, consistent, sequence that it originally had, and now every time I look at it, I get a little queasy because while it made perfect since as a SLC, as a Control Logix control it seems stupid and clunky. It gets a little harder to keep the maintenance guys up to speed as well and they tend to be intimidated by it. I don't have time to sit down and do a complete re-write. I'll have some problems justifying a contractor expense to re-write. Nobody really cares much about it but me, anyway. I keep hacking more code in that is functional but ....Everyone cares about what goes in and what comes out but the black box in the middle doesn't really mean too much. Okay, now some questions. Where can I see some good examples of what is being done in industry? I realize that code is money, but how about some conceptual stuff? How about some discussion around what some UDT's would be applicable? Or some AOI's with parameters that help get some modularity and consistency back? I am talking to Rockwell Engineering and my local vendor's tech guy is helpful, but I can't get my head wrapped around it good enough yet. Rockwell will try to sell Batch and I don't really see what the benefits would be to me. Too much? Then maybe an encouraging word or two....