GrowHow overhauls ESD at UK plant

14 May 2010

GrowHow is set to upgrade an emergency shutdown system (ESD) as its Teeside Billingham plant in the UK. The new system, a TÜV certified H51qHS solution, will be implemented by systems integrator Hima-Sella.

GrowHow UK is a UK fertiliser manufacturer and a major supplier to the process chemicals industry. Its extensive Billingham chemical plant produces and stores ammonia, nitric acid and ammonium nitrate and at the heart of the Teesside chemical cluster.

Hima-Sella supplied the existing ESD in the 90s, a TÜV certified Hima Planar F rack mounted solid state fail safe logic system installed behind a large operator wall mimic in the Weak Nitric Acid (WNA) 4 control room. The programmable upgrade provides extensive diagnostic and Sequence of Event (SOE) reporting facilities and dedicated communications to the Distributed Control System (DCS).

During technical consultations with GrowHow UK’s engineers, the TÜV certified HIQuad H51qHS system, which can meet SIL3 requirements, was selected as a suitable replacement for the hardwired system. With dual CPUs and single failsafe I/O configured in this case to meet SIL 2, it will be mounted in the same cabinet space and use existing terminations in the adjacent marshalling panel. The PLC will have dual Ethernet communications allowing vital diagnostic information to be transferred to the distributed control system (DCS), to operator Human Machine Interface (HMI) level.

A separate, standalone PC with Wizcon Logline will provide independent sequence of events recording (SOE) allowing operators and managers to see the chain of events for any given situation.


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