WHEN Coopers Brewery, Australia’s largest family-owned brewery, decided to relocate from Leabrook to Regency Park in 2001, it made plans to commission a new brew house with a Profibus communications system.
International brew house designers Briggs of Burton proposed linking all measuring points with a Profibus communications system, based on its outstanding success in other brew houses worldwide.
According to Coopers, this effectively ‘future-proofed’ the plant and made it Australia’s first Profibus PA-networked brew house.
Today, the Coopers brew house uses Profibus DP, to link the PLCs and SCADA, Profibus PA, to measure and control the level, temperature, flow, pressure and valves, as well as ASi bus, for the digital I/O. The brew house also features power meters, temperature, pressure and level transmitters and flow control valves.
Coopers says successful commercial brewing depends on the accurate management of a highly complex series of processes. Precise, integrated process data on density, flow, level, pressure, pH and temperature is crucial for effective process control.
According to Coopers, since the introduction of Profibus, its process managers are now obtaining more accurate and immediate feedback on every measurement parameter and measuring point at all process stages. Better process control has also increased the efficiency of sub-processes within the brew house — such as the collection of spent grain and CIP processes.
Coopers says there were some issues that needed to be worked through as part of the learning curve, most notably in the area of communications. Communications can be lost if the last node in a segment loses power. This interferes with the termination resistance of the segment and can pull down the entire network.
Australia’s only accredited Profibus International Competence Centre (PICC), established by Tyco Flow Control Pacific, states that a termination resistor must be placed at the ends of each segment to prevent this problem from occurring.
The PICC says a powered termination resistor does not take an address on a segment, but does represent a device and a maximum of 32 devices can be linked in a segment. Slave addresses must be allocated carefully and recorded by the installer.
If a device is set to an address that has already been assigned to another device, it will cause conflict errors. Double addressing can be easily picked up by an analysis tool, according to the PICC.
Brew houses are typically harsh environments with high temperatures, aggressive processes and caustic cleaning materials. These can be hazardous for workers and machinery, as well as damaging to cabling. Profibus can reduce the amount of cabling needed within the plant, enabling process instruments to be added quickly and easily into the network with out the risk of damage and maintenance costs.
Coopers says it is continuing to introduce Profibus PA throughout the remainder of the plant as it upgrades and expands to meet growing market demand for its products.
The brewer has deployed ProfiTrace as the predictive maintenance tool across the network. This powerful analysis tool allows technicians to check and troubleshoot the complete network and thus plays a significant role in plant asset management.
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