Bailey Network 90 / INFI 90 / Harmony DCS upgrade to 800xA for Arkema chemicals in US

The Arkema chemical plant in Calvert City, Kentucky, USA manufactures the Kynar® polymer, the R134a refrigerant, the F141/F142 blowing agent and other chemicals. Arkema plant management has a record of continuously improving their control systems to keep up with increasing production demands and to maximize the financial return on their installed systems. Arkema has kept up by seamlessly integrating new functions and features into their initial Network 90 system by evolving to the INFI 90 and Harmony control systems.

Over the years, Arkema has been driven to increase production capacity, improve operator procedures and responsiveness, establish connectivity to other installed systems and devices in the plant such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and to more effectively address environmental and safety issues.

To meet these challenges, Arkema embarked on an evolution plan for the Human Machine Interface (HMI) for their Control System. As a first step, an inventory of their installed HMI was taken and a set of upgrade requirements established. After evaluating several HMI offerings, including two from ABB, Arkema selected ABB System 800xA as the system of choice for their next generation of HMI. Arkema was able to evolve the installed HMI to 800xA while the Network 90/INFI 90/ Harmony control system remained in place, keeping the plant running and making money.

The initial implementation was dedicated to a single process area. As the engineering and testing was completed, the new 800xA workstations were deployed to operate alongside the existing Conductor VMS consoles. This implementation provides for parallel operations using the installed HMI and the new ABB system 800xA to effect a seamless transition for the operators. As a result, operator training, procedure changes and production downtime are kept to a minimum. These benefits are further supported by the ABB Automation Sentinel updates, as well as ABB technical and phone support.

In executing this upgrade, Arkema took the opportunity to clean anomalies out of the system database, thus making it easier to maintain in the future.