ENGINEER TO ENGINEER
Equipment sales and hire firm MHM Group worked with Illumin8 to provide
eco-friendly lighting for Anglesey’s Holyhead truck park. The temporarily
site enables customs, market surveillance and other checks for the passage
to and from Ireland. While diesel-powered 9m lighting towers would have
traditionally been used, MHM Group has developed a 5.5m solar streetlight
model that offers zero carbon emissions. A total of 44 were supplied.
UK wastewater facility benefits from
Sulzer HST turbocompressors
Since installing four Sulzer HST
turbocompressors in 2012, Severn Trent’s
Rushmoor wastewater treatment has enjoyed
a significant reduction in maintenance costs,
energy consumption and unplanned downtime.
That experience has led to the company
installing another four Sulzer HSTs during its
most recent facility upgrade.
Maintenance savings were a primary decision
driver for UK water utility Severn Trent when it
installed four Sulzer HST units in its Rushmoor
wastewater treatment plant in 2012. The
Rushmoor facility in Shropshire serves more
than 50,000 people in the nearby town of
Telford, and the HST turbocompressors were
installed as part
of a new aeration
system built to
meet the needs
of the fastgrowing
local
population.
Andy Bradford, site manager for the
Rushmoor facility, comments: “The four positive
displacement compressors used in the plant’s
previous aeration process had each incurred
around £10,000 in annual maintenance costs.
Worse, the units had been prone to failures in
service requiring disruptive emergency repairs.
In the eight years since the switch to Sulzer
HSTs, our compressor maintenance costs have
been almost entirely eliminated, and the units
are still operating as effectively today as when
they were first installed.”
Severn Trent embarked on a further
expansion project at Rushmoor in 2018, and
following an extensive tendering process, Sulzer
HSTs were again selected due to the lowest
overall TOTEX costs and trouble-free operation
of other Sulzer turbocompressors on site.
The Sulzer HST units feature a simple
mechanical design, with compression provided
by a turbo air-end which rotates at very high
speed on friction-free maglev bearings.
In brief
Mitsubishi Electric has helped
Labman Automation in the
development of a compact, fully
automated and high-throughput
formulation system in under seven
months. The unit has been created
for CPI’s National Formulation
Centre and is built around two
MELFA RV-series six-axis robots
with CR800 controllers. These
support processing, dispensing and
handling activities for a wide range
of materials. This advanced setup
can enhance productivity by 5-10
times. The cell fits three processing
sections in an area of 21 m².
ELGi Compressors Europe, a
subsidiary of ELGi Equipments
Limited, one of the world’s leading
air compressor manufacturers, has
provided a turnkey solution to a
global brake pad manufacturer
based in Hartlepool. ELGi,
together with its authorised
channel partner Compressors
and Pipework Systems (CAPS),
replaced the existing compressed
air system resulting in improved
operational efficiency, reduced
site air pressure by 0.5 bar and
decreased energy consumption by
approximately 3.5%. CAPS’ 600kW
turnkey solution comprised four
new ELGi air compressors (two
EG132 Premium and two EG160
VFD Premium), two refrigerated
air dryers, high-quality aluminium
pipework and oil-water-separators.
Make UK has collaborated with
Malvern-based technology start-up
FloWide on an innovative new
tracking system for the CNC area
of its technology hub in Aston,
Birmingham. The system provides
a ‘GPS-like’ indoor tracking solution
for the manufacturing shop floor. It
is composed of electronic tags and
anchors on the hardware, coupled
with a customisable software
interface. Tags are fixed on mobile
items within the manufacturing
shop floor: forklifts, trolleys, boxes
or directly on the parts. The anchors
are placed in key locations around
the shop floor. It means that a
digital version of the shopfloor is
accessible online with the real time
location of every tracked item.
Helping to increase the sustainability
of waste-to-energy plants
A by-product of the power generation process
at waste-to-energy plants, incinerator bottom
ash (IBA) can be recycled into construction
aggregates and metals. Specialising in the
transformation of this residue ash, Blue Phoenix
wanted to improve the reliability, uptime and
troubleshooting capabilities of its plant in
Widnes, Cheshire. To achieve this, Mitsubishi
Electric and Total Automated Solutions (TAS)
provided an upgraded control system consisting
of a MELSEC iQ-R PLC with three Ethernet/IP
modules and GT SoftGOT2000 PC based HMI
software.
The implementation of the
entire solution was completed
with only two hours of planned
downtime and was said to
greatly enhance the reliability,
as well as accessibility, of the
plant control system.
Nigel Mitchell, operations director at Blue
Phoenix, said: “This facility was originally built
with a framework supplied by an alternate
vendor. Over time, we noticed that the control
system, and by extension the plant itself, was
not as reliable and user-friendly as the ones
provided by TAS. The recycling processes often
stopped, and on top of that it was difficult to
find the cause of a fault, as troubleshooting was
not easy, which led to increased downtime.”
To provide an updated control set-up and
bring the Widnes facility in line with other
Blue Phoenix plants while minimising costs
and downtime, TAS suggested
upgrading the existing PLC
with a Mitsubishi Electric iQ-R.
As a result, TAS did not need to
make any network modifications
whilst ensuring communications
between the PLC and plant drives.
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