Page 32 - Industrial Technology March 2020 issue

SYSTEM INTEGRATION

SMART GRAVEL PLANT

DRIVES & CONTROL SYSTEMS

SWISS BUILDING MATERIAL
COMPANY MODERNIZES PLANT
WITH DIGITALISATION
COMPONENTS FROM SIEMENS
ibag is a leading player in the building material
and construction sector and operates multiple
gravel and cement plants, building companies,
Kand recycling and waste-disposal companies. At
the gravel and cement plant in Birr, the company
excavates around 230,000 tonnes of gravel every year. In
order to improve efficiency and at the same time make
better use of resources and personnel, Kibag relies on
digitalisation.
The company also modernised the whole plant in Birr
in 2018 using components from the Siemens portfolio. As
a result, machines, conveyors, breakers, and loading
stations can now be controlled from a tablet and plant
disruptions can be easily and quickly resolved. This makes
the Birr production facility one of the most up-to-date and
efficient of its kind.
This is how it used to be: one employee located at the
control center, and employees with radios who were
supposed to understand the instructions from central
while surrounded by deafening noise levels. It goes
without saying that this is not efficient, let alone beneficial Stuber AG (Stuber), a Swiss general contractor in the Simatic S7-1500 Safety CPU controllers. They are
to health. fields of electronics, building services, and industrial supplemented by local ET200SP I/O systems.
Kibag also recognised this which is why the company installation. Stuber quickly identified that a stable and The soft starters prevent damage to the drives by
completely modernised its plant in Birr, turning to Louis reliable control and communications infrastructure would providing the machines with a smooth start and also
be required to digitalise the plant which is why they damp out voltage spikes from the mains. A WinCC
turned to the experts on Siemens technology from the Professional Scada visualisation system and a Simatic
Scalance and Simatic portfolio. IPC547G industrial PC acting as a server provide the
visualization. This allows employees to see at a glance the
Control and communications current fill levels or which conveyor is in operation. An
Stuber installed three new control cabinets to remove the ITP1000 tablet PC and two W786 Scalance access points
material by loading it onto trucks and railway wagons, and provide mobile operation. The whole automation was
to feed the cement plant. These cabinets contained not completed in Version 15 of the TIA (Totally Integrated
only the motor circuit breakers, Sinamics frequency Automation) engineering framework portal.
converters and Sirius soft starters but also two fail-safe Production resumed in record time In addition to
integrating the new components into the existing system,
a further challenge for those involved in the project was to
keep the down time for the refurbishment and
modernization to an absolute minimum. The basic
requirement was exceptional planning – planning which
included, for example, simulation of the Simatic S7
PLCSIM in a test environment.
“The industrial engineering department at Kibag had
prepared their scheduling systems for the integration as
best they could and the simulation provided us with the
certainty that the systems would interact as required. This
allowed us to take on the extremely tight commissioning
deadline,” remembers Stuber’s Lukas Buri. Just in terms
of numbers, this means that the plant was operational
again after only two weeks and the team was able to
complete the project within the estimated deadline.
MORE INFORMATION: www.siemens.de/simatic

INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY • March 2020
32