Rockwell Automation Revamp Gives BASF Rapid Implementation and Lower Maintenance Costs

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“This was a major reason for the project going off so smoothly,” he adds. “I first noticed it with the Factory Acceptance Test (FAT), which had been meticulously planned from start to finish. The test sheets were documented, signed and neatly filed. Particularly convincing was that Rockwell Automation, unlike some other providers, was able to keep up the high level of quality over many years.”

In the highly-regulated pharmaceutical industry, this approach has long been standard practice because of the many international audits involved. With a loading facility for the chemical industry, however, many other suppliers would shy away from the large amount of extra work involved. This may change in the future, as Frübis recognizes: “Structuring the project in this way makes sense for any system supplier, especially in terms of quality assurance. It’s bound to become more widespread, even outside the pharmaceutical industry.”

As the project neared completion, an important part of the preparation phase was the two weeks spent on intensive testing at Rockwell Automation’s application centre in Karlsruhe. Teams from Rockwell Automation and BASF worked together to check every function down to the last detail. Their detailed preparation work paid off when the real deployment started: the only part to need any extra work was the Modbus connection to the production control system, and with everything else running as planned, even this was not a major stumbling block.

Commissioning and beyond

Plant commissioning can be a hectic affair, especially with the three-day window allotted to this project, so it was at this stage that Rockwell Automation’s careful preparation really paid off.

The team first replaced the PLC5 controllers with three redundant Allen-Bradley ControlLogix programmable automation controllers (PACs). The existing 10 Mbit/s Ethernet network for the PCs was then replaced by a 100 Mbit/s network with two Rockwell Automation Stratix 8000 switches. Several of the display and operator components were also upgraded to newer devices with the same functionality as the old ones. The previous visualization system was replaced by a FactoryTalk View client-server system along with a redundant server.

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