Application 14

Application No.14 - Upgrade of Obsolete equipment

This application deals with the upgrade of the control system covered in our Application 5

The control system, being nearly 25 yrs old, now had obsolete components as the central part of the system.

Both the PLC and SCADA system (not as old) were no longer supported.

It was, therefore, decided to upgrade both to something more current which should be supported for many years to come.

The PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) was a fairly straightforward choice. The obsolete Mitsubishi AnS series equipment was replaced by the Mitsubishi Q series equipment. The advance in technology over the years has meant that where we had two AnS PLCs constantly communicating with each other, we could now accommodate all I/O and processing requirements within a single Q-series system.

The SCADA system was not doing anything which could not be handled by current HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces). HMIs have progressed significantly over recent years making SCADA systems less popular. The advantage of the HMI is that the PLC manufacturer will always ensure that it's HMI is able to talk to it;s PLC. (Assuming, of course that you use the same manufacturer's PLC and HMI. Something which PJC Systems are very strict about). There is no problem when (for example) the version of Microsoft Windows is updated; something which has affected a number of SCADA systems over the years.

For this reason we chose to replace the existing MX4 systems (no longer supported by Mitsubishi) with Mitsubishi GT 2000 series HMIs