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The East African Portland Cement Company has installed a 120 million new electronic control system for its manufacturing plant at the Athi River Works to increase efficiency in production and process supervision.
According to Mr Kananga M’Nchebere, the Chief Electrical Engineer, who is in charge of the upgrading project, the new system is based on the Expert Control and Supervision (ECS) technology and is the latest in the market.
“We have gone for the best technology the market can offer. The new control system is many times over superior to the one we have been using in the past,” he says. The Human- Machine Interface comprises a server/client PC architecture running on the latest Windows platform. The system is non-proprietary open architecture and hardware independent. This makes it very operation and maintenance friendly.
Mr M’Nchebere cites some of the advantages of the new system as waste reduction, user friendliness, easy monitoring and maintenance, as well as effective trouble shooting.
“The new system is up to scratch in effectiveness. It gives process details in real time terms” he says.
The system, sold and installed by FLSmidth, a leading supplier of cement plant equipment in Denmark, operates on an open architecture system, which makes it easy to maintain and integrate to other networks.
Emphasising on the cost-saving properties of the new system, Mr M’Nchebere adds that users can customise the system to generate reports as the need arises and create their own dashboards. The reports are designed to be easy for anybody to understand without the need for technical interpretation.
“The database capability of the ECS is far superior to the former system which would print out process incidents as they occurred to create space, leading to paper wastage. It was also not easy to capture and address lapses immediately they occurred,” says the engineer.
He adds that the new system will enable the company to save on raw material intake and facilitate smoother processing. Information exchange, data storage and process trending will also become efficient. The system also gives plant status to programmed mobile phones using the SMS technology.
To prepare for the installation, the company sent a team of technical staff to Denmark on a familiarisation mission, which was followed by an intensive training of hands-on crew. This paved the way for a smooth transition within 21 days.
Citing a connection between the new system and a new mill to be in place in less than 10 months, Mr M’Nchebere said the mill’s installation would mark the climax of Portland’s plant modernisation process.
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