Plant Monitoring Alarm System

Gainsborough have recently installed a plant wide critical alarm system for a major pharmaceutical company.

The controls philosophy behind this project was that our customer wanted to monitor and acknowledge all potential machine, process and personal safety alarms and display these on various touch screens (HMI) throughout the plant.

Gainsborough’s approach to this large project was to install a central control panel complete with PLC and HMI plus a 2nd control panel complete with PLC point I/O and HMI that was sited in the main security gatehouse.

We then installed a number of remote indicator control panels throughout the site; the purpose of the remote indicator control panels was to collect the various local alarms from that particular area of the plant via PLC point I/O modules.

These signals were then transmitted back to both the central and gatehouse control panels simultaneously via a RIO communication network.

Another interesting challenge to this job was that our customer also requested that the various remote alarm panels still function and display faults even if the main PLC went faulty, communications was lost or even in the event of loss of mains power.

To achieve this Gainsborough designed in a PLC bypass redundancy circuit for all alarms in each remote panel; we also fitted UPS for all control panels allowing a maximum run time of 25 minutes after loss of power.

The plant monitoring control system has now been installed for over 4 years, and the controls philosophy has been so successful that our customer has requested Gainsborough to add additional remote panels and controls; this has resulted in the system growing significantly from its conceptual size.

Our customer can now monitor and acknowledge every possible alarm from all areas of the site simultaneously even if there is a PLC or communications fault or loss of power.

The control system has grown to become a very powerful tool that could potentially save our customer large sums of money from flood or fire damage plus the added advantage of staff emergency help points placed throughout the site.

Gainsborough control panel, control systems, electrical enclosures, PLC programming, touch screen (HMI) and on site electrical wiring installation, PLC programming and HMI programming software were all required to build this system.