Scada For Batching Process

[Noely 0]

Just a quick question. What is the best scada software for implementing a batching process. Looked at Citect but got no information back from them in relation to price etc. Have experience with Rockwells RSView 3.1 but it hasn't got the recipie function. Would ye recomend thet I persist with this and look into purchasing it but I have yet to get a price on it. I'm using an Allen Bradley SLC 500 plc and I am thinking of going into to this area a bit more. Any suggestios or feedback would be really appreciated.

[Ken Moore 23]

In my opinion, a batching process, and simple recipe loading are not the same thing. With simple recipes, your process is always the same, you just vary the quantities of the ingredients. With a true batching control system, you may or may not do everything in the same sequence. You may or may not use all of the equipment in a batch train, each batch is different. If you try and conform with ISA-S88, then you have break down your process into units and phases, and program accordingly. There are several commercial batch engines on the market, WonderWare Director and Intellution iBatch are just two. The batch engine, controls the sequence that the units are activated and which phases run within the unit. Setpoints and such are passed to the phases from the batch engine. I'm not sure if you are asking for a batch engine, or an HMI with recipe capabilities.

[paulengr 44]

There is an "RS-Batch" or some such for RS-View. There is a "batch" module for GE Cimplicity, and a similar one for Wonderware. In general, what I found is that these things seem to be pretty worthless to me. All it gives you normally is a big list of recipes that you can edit and or upload/download to your chosen PLC. By the time you customize the heck out of it to do what you want, the base capabilities that it came with hardly save you any time at all. You can just as easily create a few custom scripts that store the recipes in your choice of database formats (SQL server of some sort, Excel, flat files, etc.). And you still had to make a snazzy user-oriented GUI on top of the canned stuff anyways. In the recipe systems I've done, I usually ended up burying them in the PLC most of the time. The only problem with the PLC is persistence and the risk that if the PLC takes a nose dive, you end up with all the old recipes. Hard drives generally seem to be slightly more robust...or at least come with better backup utilities. Finally, have you considered a Panelview (+)? Or some equivalent panel HMI? At least the Panelview+ modules come with a recipe load/save system built into the unit and they load/save conveniently onto a flash memory card. The original Panelviews weren't so nice but I like the newer ones and they are only slightly obscenely priced. I've also seen similar functions in the competitor's equipment. For the record, I wrote three recipe systems in the last 2 years. Two used the PLC for storage and the last one actually did it all using SQL manipulations from the HMI where the PLC had little to do with it at all other than reading in the values. But this last one was actually part of a much larger system (a full blown production scheduler). If it is a batching system, then as the previous post said...that's another matter. I'm a huge fan of state machines for batch systems in terms of programming the PLC nuances. But I've also looked over the phase manager in CLX and drooled. I'm planning on making heavy use of it on my next big project.

[rpraveenkum 5]

Rsview32 got recipie & extendend recipie pro software comes along with rsview package