Applications: Chemical Blending

Kingspan Building Products

Requirement

Kingspan are the global leaders in the manufacture of insulated roof, wall and panels for the construction industry.  Their products are seen as the facades of commercial and  industrial buildings, leisure facilities schools and hospitals worldwide.  They are unseen in homes as they are built across the world insulating to the highest standards to meet the needs of our increasingly environmentally conscious planet. 

Automating the chemical blending process giving a safe and robust system was the priority of the engineers in Holywell North Wales in 1996 when Synectic first became involved.  The step from manually opening valves using weight indicators under bulk storage tanks was not an option any longer for the Irish company as its order books were full and demand outstripped their ability to supply their great range of products.  The complex blend of chemicals needed precise measurements.  The buyers needed the ability to review stock to ensure continuity of supply.  The range of products needing a variety of blends needed to automatically measured blended recorded and moved to storage tanks. With the operators able to record the types of mix and label it when it reached its destination. 

Solution

Synectic's instrumentation networked together with an industrial PC gave the best of both worlds, accuracy of high end A to D converters giving the tightest controls over the measurement of expensive an volatile ingredient blends with a computerised system at Kingspan Group plc accurately measures and blends the complex recipes of chemicals which makes up the foam filling in Kingspan's award winning products giving full graphical representations of the tank farm and user friendly PC software that enables recipe uploading and editing, data downloading.

The weighing  and flow measurement is controlled by the SY017 Batch controller which accurately measures and controls complex recipes of chemicals.  The system has serial connection to a printer which enables end of batch printouts as well as logging facility where data is downloaded in spreadsheet format for Quality assurance and stock control.a  . 

The site at Holywell began operating in 1996 and a similar but improved system was installed in Sherburn near Scarborough the following year have been operating day and night with a system that Kingspan's own polymer engineers had a hand in specifying. What Kingspan liked about the first system was; 

1. Robustness of the system. Non volatile storage of calibration details.

 2. The system is not reliant on PLCs unlike offerings of most other process control systems

 3. Instruments are controlled by a PC which stores all of the recipes and logs the history of all batches that it blends.  On screen graphics show representations of tank contents indicate pumps and valve status and enable measuring mixing blending and movement between one storage vessel and another

 4. If the PC develops a problem the controllers can be used as stand alone instruments to accurately weigh all of the ingredients