Company Size
1,000+
Region
- Pacific
Country
- Australia
Product
- EcoStruxure Plant
- Modicon M580 Safety PLCs
- AVEVA’s Citect SCADA software
Tech Stack
- IoT
- SCADA
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Environmental Impact Reduction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
Applicable Industries
- Agriculture
- Renewable Energy
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Process Manufacturing
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Wilmar Sugar Australia is the country’s leading manufacturer of raw sugar. The company owns and operates eight sugar mills in Queensland, crushing about 15.5 million tonnes of sugarcane each year to produce more than two million tonnes of raw sugar. Wilmar is also Australia’s leading producer of renewable energy from biomass. Electricity is generated at each mill in on-site industrial boilers by burning bagasse – the fibrous material left over after the juice has been extracted from sugarcane. Bagasse is burned at temperatures of up to 800oC to produce steam. High-pressure steam is used to drive alternator turbines, generating power for the milling process and the electricity grid. Combined, Wilmar’s eight mills produce about 600,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year, with significant quantities exported to the Queensland power grid. Annually, Wilmar exports enough electricity to power more than 80,000 Australian homes for a year.
The Challenge
Wilmar Sugar Australia, the country's leading manufacturer of raw sugar, operates eight sugar mills in Queensland. The company crushes about 15.5 million tonnes of sugarcane each year, producing more than two million tonnes of raw sugar. Wilmar is also Australia’s leading producer of renewable energy from biomass. The company's Invicta Mill, one of Australia's largest sugar mills, required a major upgrade of its boiler control system to ensure the ongoing safety and reliability of the site’s power production capabilities. The existing boiler control system equipment was reaching its end of life and required replacing. An upgrade was planned to simplify the control systems and embed safety procedures into the system, itself. The ideal solution was a control system that would enable Wilmar to have a complete view of all the factory’s systems in one easy-to-use interface.
The Solution
Wilmar chose to install new Schneider Electric Modicon M580 Safety PLCs at its Invicta Mill, replacing multiple controllers which were previously monitored individually. The M580 Safety PLCs use the same software tools, wiring methods, and X80 I/O structure as the M580 ePAC, also in use at Wilmar factories. This reduces the spare parts inventory and maintenance costs. AVEVA’s Citect SCADA software provides the user-interface for factory controls at Wilmar’s mills. With the help of mobile devices, the software enables remote access to the systems, so even when employees are not on site, they can receive alerts, or log into the system to check equipment. This means production personnel are able to make immediate adjustments to the sugar milling process with ease and accuracy, whether they are on or off site. At the heart of the Schneider Electric solution is the EcoStruxure Plant architecture. This architecture includes Schneider Electric protection relays, graphical interfaces as well as Citect SCADA software which brings all the control systems together, creating a unified picture of exactly what equipment is running and how efficiently. The seamlessly integrated EcoStruxure Plant architecture creates a system which operates efficiently and robustly, with minimal input.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
![](/files/casestudy/Remote-Monitoring---Predictive-Maintenance-App-for-a-Solar-Energy-System.png)
Case Study
Remote Monitoring & Predictive Maintenance App for a Solar Energy System
The maintenance & tracking of various modules was an overhead for the customer due to the huge labor costs involved. Being an advanced solar solutions provider, they wanted to ensure early detection of issues and provide the best-in-class customer experience. Hence they wanted to automate the whole process.
![](/files/casestudy/Intelligent-Farming-with-ThingWorx-Analytics.png)
Case Study
Intelligent Farming with ThingWorx Analytics
Z Farms was facing three challenges: costly irrigation systems with water as a limited resource, narrow optimal ranges of soil moisture for growth with difficult maintenance and farm operators could not simply turn on irrigation systems like a faucet.
![](/files/casestudy/Vestas--Turning-Climate-into-Capital-with-Big-Data.png)
Case Study
Vestas: Turning Climate into Capital with Big Data
Making wind a reliable source of energy depends greatly on the placement of the wind turbines used to produce electricity. Turbulence is a significant factor as it strains turbine components, making them more likely to fail. Vestas wanted to pinpoint the optimal location for wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs.
![](/files/casestudy/Siemens-Wind-Power.png)
Case Study
Siemens Wind Power
Wind provides clean, renewable energy. The core concept is simple: wind turbines spin blades to generate power. However, today's systems are anything but simple. Modern wind turbines have blades that sweep a 120 meter circle, cost more than 1 million dollars and generate multiple megawatts of power. Each turbine may include up to 1,000 sensors and actuators – integrating strain gages, bearing monitors and power conditioning technology. The turbine can control blade speed and power generation by altering the blade pitch and power extraction. Controlling the turbine is a sophisticated job requiring many cooperating processors closing high-speed loops and implementing intelligent monitoring and optimization algorithms. But the real challenge is integrating these turbines so that they work together. A wind farm may include hundreds of turbines. They are often installed in difficult-to-access locations at sea. The farm must implement a fundamentally and truly distributed control system. Like all power systems, the goal of the farm is to match generation to load. A farm with hundreds of turbines must optimize that load by balancing the loading and generation across a wide geography. Wind, of course, is dynamic. Almost every picture of a wind farm shows a calm sea and a setting sun. But things get challenging when a storm goes through the wind farm. In a storm, the control system must decide how to take energy out of gusts to generate constant power. It must intelligently balance load across many turbines. And a critical consideration is the loading and potential damage to a half-billion-dollar installed asset. This is no environment for a slow or undependable control system. Reliability and performance are crucial.
![](/files/casestudy/Remote-Monitoring-and-Control-for-a-Windmill-Generator.png)
Case Study
Remote Monitoring and Control for a Windmill Generator
As concerns over global warming continue to grow, green technologies are becoming increasingly popular. Wind turbine companies provide an excellent alternative to burning fossil fuels by harnessing kinetic energy from the wind and converting it into electricity. A typical wind farm may include over 80 wind turbines so efficient and reliable networks to manage and control these installations are imperative. Each wind turbine includes a generator and a variety of serial components such as a water cooler, high voltage transformer, ultrasonic wind sensors, yaw gear, blade bearing, pitch cylinder, and hub controller. All of these components are controlled by a PLC and communicate with the ground host. Due to the total integration of these devices into an Ethernet network, one of our customers in the wind turbine industry needed a serial-to-Ethernet solution that can operate reliably for years without interruption.