AST Manufacturing Systems Integration (MSI), a business unit of the AST Group, has completed the upgrade of the total plant system for Lafarge Cement`s Kaalfontein blending plant. The contract, valued at R1.2 million, was completed in just three months.
The project involved the replacement of the Lafarge Cement legacy system, a Turbolink SCADA running on a Siemens S5 PLC, with a Siemens S7 PLC solution in combination with a WinCC SCADA. In addition, all plant I/O needed to be traced, and the entire electrical system updated.
The Lafarge Cement Kaalfontein plant receives a range of pre-processed products, blends them and packages or bulk loads the blended product. "Our legacy system was no longer flexible enough to meet our requirements," explains Heinrich de Beer, Depot Manager of Lafarge Cement Kaalfontein. "The new solution and the updated electrical system will certainly improve maintainability."
"The Siemens S7 PLC & WinCC SCADA combination offers the user easy system control and maintenance at the press of a button," says Ruben Miller of AST MSI. "With its `single window` view of the system, the solution also allows the user to configure the system and initiate faultfinding routines, with minimum effort.
"With the help of AST MSI, we now also have a full set of updated plant drawings and documentation. When a plant system is modified and expanded by different integrators over a long period of time, the drawings tend to become outdated," said De Beer.
The system installed by AST MSI is easy to use, and provides Lafarge with the flexibility to accommodate additional functionality that may be required in the future.
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