What the plant does

The rig was designed to process fifteen components at a time, but allowed a further fifteen components to be loaded/unloaded onto the other half of the rig whilst the first half was processing.

The first part of the process was to evacuate the components. If this failed due to a leak on one (or more) of the component parts, the system would run a routine to determine which component(s) were defective. A test would be run on the first five components only to see if these would evacuate. If this was successful the system would move on and test the second batch of five, but if not, would run individual tests on each of the first five. Any individual component which failed at this stage would be eliminated from the rest of the sequence, and flagged up on the hmi.

When all fifteen components have been confirmed as leak free (or not), the test sequence will be run on the leak free components, and the current status will be displayed on the hmi, complete with countdown timers for each stage.

At the end of the sequence, the hmi will show which of the components has passed, and which had been excluded from the test.

Once the one set of fifteen components has completed the sequence, the sequence on the second fifteen could be started whilst the first batch were being unloaded, and a further fifteen components loaded