This past November, Rama Sinha, Houston Automation’s Business Manager, presented at Rockwell Automation’s Process Solution Process Users Group. The topic of the presentation was the Houston Automation group’s recent Honeywell HC900 to Rockwell PlantPAx migration for KMCO at their 200-acre petrochemical and manufacturing facility in Crosby, Texas.

KMCO develops various specialty products, including glycol based products, antifreezes, brake fluids, cement grinding aids, and a wide range of oilfield intermediates for formulation into products for the petroleum exploration, production, refining, chemical process, and hydrocarbon additives industries. They provide custom processing for raw materials in various batch sizes, and the facility operates reactor systems, distillation columns, flashers, evaporators, filtrations and a variety of other systems. Prior to the migration, all operations were controlled with redundant Honeywell HC900 controllers that were installed in 2013. Sadly, the system suffered from numerous hardware failures and software issues which occurred two or three times a month, costing the facility approximately $10,000 per month on replacements components and callouts. Some of these were:

• Communications failures
• Fiber connection failures
• I/O card failures
• Lack of a reliable PC sound alarm on the HMI
• Slow HMI graphics
• Easy confusion with many Thin Clients using Remote Desktop

It was ultimately determined that the root cause of the issue was system overload and stress, since the HC900 system designed for small to medium automation projects was not robust enough for the level of KMCO’s use.

An evaluation was done on whether to continue using Honeywell by upgrading to an Experion PKS system or to migrate to Rockwell PlantPAx – a modular and cost-effective automation platform with DCS capabilities. Factors such as the current plant infrastructure using mostly Rockwell-based wiring, the need for robust batch management controls, and the capacity to handle controls for the entire plant as well as future expansions aided in choosing PlantPAx, but the primary factors were significantly shorter downtime for cutover and lower overall system cost.

Figure 1. Totalizer configuration in Honeywell HC900.

Technical Feature

The network architecture for the migration included redundant ControlLogix PACs for centralized logic operations, communicating with four remote I/O racks and various Modbus and RTA modules, as well as a FactoryTalk Server running in a VMWare virtual environment on Stratus hardware serving up data to 17 thin clients for multiple operator stations. The bulk of the migration involved migrating Honeywell function blocks to PlantPAx function blocks. This had to be done manually, but was a reasonable smooth process due to the similarity of function block diagrams in both systems.

Figure 2. Totalizer configuration in Rockwell PlantPAx.

Additionally, PlantPAx’s tools allowed quick manipulation and configuration for signal and calculation blocks. The most relevant advantage of the new system is the ability of the operator to apply parameter changes using the graphic faceplate from the HMI. This allows the facility to troubleshoot, provide maintenance, and optimize the process more efficiently.

It should be noted that the best strategy for configuring routines in ControlLogix controllers (and most systems) is to break up logic into small routines, rather than large routines encompassing each process individually, which allows the controller to process logic quickly, and serve data to update graphics in real time.

Benefits

Figure 4. PlantPAx Configuration Pop-up for Product Totalizer

Figure 3. PlantPAx Configuration Pop-up for PID Controller

PlantPAx increased the flexibility of upgrading hardware and software as well as provided room for future process changes and additions in the entire plant. It also facilitated access to plant information in real-time for increased control. In addition, the facility will get significant use out of the FactoryTalk ProductionCentre components of Inventory Manager, PI Historian, Batch Management, and Vantage Point.

The choice to migrate to PlantPAx aligned with the customer’s goals for future standardization, and PlantPAx required a relatively low number of programming changes. By migrating to PlantPAx, the customer realized the following benefits:

• Increased Uptime and Production
• Reduced Maintenance and Troubleshooting Time
• Improved Safety
• Improved Operator Readability
• Increased Operation Efficiency
• Improved HMI Security
• Reduced Configuration Time

The Houston Automation group was selected for this project in a competitive bid with three other companies. We believe that several positive experiences for KMCO with two of Champion’s Louisiana offices in the past encouraged the customer to select Champion to complete this project as well.