Retrofitting a Classic Colour Touch Screen OCS

This project took place in Italy along with our Italian Horner Distributor Tex-El and a local system integrator. It had a short implementation period of just 3 days.

Project Summary

This project took place in Italy along with our Italian Horner Distributor Tex-El and a local system integrator. It had a short implementation period of just 3 days. The application was using an OCS 500 10″ which was 21 years old. There was a need to upgrade the system as this older model was being used to control the main process machine at the customer’s site and there was also a need for some new add-on controls which would have been more difficult and expensive to implement on this older unit.

Solution and Implementation

The XL+ OCS was chosen to upgrade the system, offering a larger 15” touch HMI and simple integration options for Horner’s WebMi remote monitoring software. The exact model was the HEXT751C113-00 XL + Model 3.

The main concern for the customer was to modify some part of the programs to have an easier plant management for the machine conductor as well as being able to monitor the plant remotely and to have the ability, in the near future, to use either a smart phone or a tablet to check the plant setup and performance. It was also important for the customer to have spare parts readily available in case of power surges.

The original control system was implemented in 2002/2003. An OCS 500 with 10″ colour Touchscreen was used as the main unit and, a metal Smartstack Profibus Master board connected to the OCS with Fiber Optic base, to control both remote I/Os and Danfoss frequency drives on a Profibus network.

Over the years they added some other CPUs and remote IO on CsCAN network to allow a better and easier plant setup and integration between the several control points. The main challenge was to be able to use all the existing I/O and drives without major changes. Despite the task, the System Integrator was able to replace the older OCS 500 with a new XL + and use a Hilscher Gateway connected in ModBus TCP to the XL+ and, as ProfiBus DP Master to control all the existing Profibus devices, in just 2 days instead of the 5 days planned.

The industry 4.0 requirements of this project included local and remote monitoring on Ethernet.

Results

Now the customer can monitor the plant from the office and, in the next few months they have already planned to use Horner’s WebMi to check and monitor the plant in the same way as the operator. The customer is now not worried anymore about downtime as the new unit program modification and part replacements allows for different choices, something which was not possible before.

With the upgrade, the plant is renewed, and the customer can expect it to last for up to 20 years and the customer had the plant back to production in 2 days instead of 5 with our quick turnaround.

The next planned upgrade for this application will be implementing Data acquisition.