Automation d'une Installation Polyvalente

Automation of a Multipurpose Facility

Abstract

The characteristics of a multipurpose production unit are its capacity to carry out chemical processes for highly complex molecules with several synthesis steps and its high flexibility to ensure fast adaptation to different manufacturing procedures, thereby greatly reducing campaign change-over times. As for the technical aspects, the unit is designed in standard and independent modules, linked to each other by distribution stations and collector groups. To meet these flexibility and rapid change-over requirements and to reduce operating costs, the production unit is automated.
The solutions chosen depend on the context of the projects. One of the main aspects of the industrial site of Monthey is the high level of automation of its equipment and the standardisation of its concepts and systems. For more than 20 years, a single type of process control system (FOCLAN) has been used on the site. Thus, coherent automation concepts are designed and passed on from project to project, encouraged by an uninterrupted development of the control system.
The automation of a multipurpose facility differs in many points from that of a standard unit. To meet project requirements in terms of safety, flexibility and multivalence, automation design has evolved towards better use of the possibilities of the automation system, a larger modularity of the 'application' programmes and a strict separation between the description of the unit (mechanical) and that of the process (recipe).