Within the ‘digital or business transformation’ stream of the Emerson Exchange EMEA 2024 conference, David Levert, project manager digital maintenance at Tereos, gave a presentation about gaining greater visibility into the health of critical machinery to enable optimized production.
Tereos transforms agricultural raw materials into sugar and sweeteners, alcohol, ethanol, electricity, starch, animal nutrition and vegetable proteins. It is the second leading sugar producer worldwide. Tereos has eight facilities in France and one in La Reunion Island that produce sweetening solutions, including crystallized sugar, beet sugar, cane sugar and liquid sugar.
The plants only operate on 150 days per year on average, and it is critical that they run perfectly during that period. Using a SCADA system to gain visibility into the health of all critical rotating equipment is a key operational strategy. For the online vibration monitoring of critical assets, such as turbines, each facility utilizes condition monitoring solutions from Emerson consisting of AMS 6500 Machinery Heath Monitor (hardware), AMS Machinery Health Manager (software) and AMS Asset Graphics (user interface).
Although the technology has been operating successfully since 2010, there are some challenges, notably relating to Microsoft Windows obsolescence and subsequent cybersecurity concerns. Each site was utilizing multiple local on-premises servers, which gave rise to concerns about available local support and loss of internal knowledge to manage the equipment. There was also a lack of standardization across the different sites, with different configurations and graphics used for the user interfaces.
DeltaV SaaS SCADA solution provides a single user interface for all Tereos sites.
Tereos decided to update the local machinery health manager servers but migrate to the DeltaV SaaS SCADA (formerly Zedi SaaS SCADA) solution from Emerson. This is a cloud-based system that provides a single consistent user interface to be used by all the sites. The new cloud-based SCADA system will transition Tereos to a software as a service (SaaS) model and move it from being an “owner” to a “user”. This will allow the company to focus on its core business.
The project is to be completed in two phases. The first focuses on flexible deployment, site by site. Phase two will then enhance performance, robustness and security compliance.
Data acquisition uses a cloud polling technique, with data collected every ten minutes, but with an on-demand acquisition capacity. The second phase will include the installation of an edge gateway with a fast polling rate. To reduce the bandwidth and data consumption requirements, but increase information relevancy, a reporting by exception functionality will be leveraged and data transmitted using MQTT, a lightweight IoT messaging protocol. Implementation started in January 2024 and is expected to be completed in March 2024.
