Grab a Slice: Movicon.NExT Optimizes Production of Two Hundred Million Pizza Crusts a Year

 In today’s industrial environment, a highly graphical, intuitive interface rich in information, including sophisticated analysis and alarm notifications, enables plants to clearly view and monitor systems and respond rapidly to alerts for problems or failures. These benefits proved critical to a frozen pizza dough producer that was able to optimize production to reduce energy consumption, maintenance requirements and equipment wear and tear.

The company, based in the Midwest, manufactures frozen pizza dough, annually producing over 200 million pizza bases and bread doughs for frozen pizza producers, restaurant chains and food service distributors. In addition, it operates two bakery installations with a production area that extends over 9,000 square meters. Their production facility requires critical cooling systems that have outputs ranging from 100 horsepower (HP) to over 12,000 HP and use hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and ammonia-based refrigerants. If they are not managed correctly, these systems can consume enormous amounts of electricity, damage equipment and pose a danger to the safety of the workers and facilities. When there is downtime, production costs increase and productivity drops. There are numerous industrial refrigeration systems using outdated technologies like mechanical timers, sequencing and manual controls. These systems require constant intervention to keep them operational and working, and many components are becoming obsolete and no longer replaceable.

When the manufacturer replaced its refrigeration systems, operators knew they needed to incorporate advanced new technologies that enabled industrial automation to modernize and optimize their systems.

By installing programmable automation controllers (PAC) and programmable logic controllers (PLC), the company enabled a complete control solution for the plant machine rooms and various system components throughout their facilities. Movicon.NExTTM SCADA software was employed for the control and supervision of the refrigeration system since it offers graphically appealing and easy-to-use interfaces that give true representations of the plant systems that need to be supervised. The operator has an intuitive graphical representation of the entire plant with a screen that provides a simple and clear way to set constants and create setpoints that are indispensable to automatically control the refrigeration system.

In addition, the same monitoring system collects data locally in a Microsoft SQL Server Express database. The Movicon.NExT database allows operators to analyze the system using trends, reports and data analysis tools that are integrated with the platform. The solution includes an Alarm Dispatcher feature that sends alarms to personnel in charge via SMS, VoIP and e-mail and a powerful Alarm Manager that allows the plant to store the alarms in a database for chronological or statistical analysis. This feature is essential to understanding and identifying where improvements can be made, as well as to planning and scheduling maintenance to reduce downtime. The sophisticated analysis and control system allows the plant to deploy resources more effectively according to workload, reduces electricity consumption and wear and tear of equipment, and increases personnel and plant safety since maintenance staff can clearly view and monitor the entire system using simple-to-navigate and user-friendly graphics.

The plant has five ammonia refrigeration compressors that maintain two temperature levels in all production areas. The compressors are used to maintain the refrigerant pressure and thus maintain the set temperatures. The refrigerant is then pumped into evaporators through the control and the pressure regulator valves. The evaporators are controlled according to room temperature setpoint inputs in Movicon.NExT. The -42° C refrigerant is used for the two spiral evaporators and represents the system’s required minimum temperature. It is also used in the freezer’s three evaporators in addition to the pressure regulator to keep the freezer at the required temperature. The -9° C refrigerant is used to cool the production evaporators of the packaging room. The lower temperatures are used in the process for freezing and maintaining the temperature of the product, while higher temperatures are used in the quality control phase and the subsequent packaging phase to prevent the product from thawing.

Progea’s Movicon.NExT SCADA interfaces with the PLC via an EthernetIP driver. The PLC monitors and sequences large ammonia refrigeration compressors, pumps and condenser systems. It also monitors and controls the temperature of the various rooms within the production plant and manages each individual evaporator as well as the programmed defrost controller. The supervisor, developed with Movicon.NExT, provides operators with a graphic interface rich in information, including set points and alarm controls. The Movicon.NExT Alarm Dispatcher is used to send alarm notifications to the remote assistance service provider so that personnel are alerted immediately of anomalies or system failures.

The Movicon.NExT graphics library enabled users to design an intuitive and simple-to-use operator interface. The library comes complete with a great variety of vector symbols and objects developed by the Progea graphics department using the XAML technology. The symbols and objects are divided into logical order for easy use, and in addition to the most commonly used objects, they also include ones in 2D and 3D.

The system includes a suite of available drivers. Movicon.NExT offers the use of several native drivers, most of which can import tags directly from the PLC or the PLC program file. This has saved a great deal of time and expense in managing tags in both the PLC and in Movicon.NExT.

For the pizza dough manufacturer, the Movicon.NExT package includes everything the facility needs for graphical control, data analysis and alarm management. By using the Alarm Dispatcher function, they are now able to control the system by remote. If any ammonia or refrigerant leaks or abnormal pressure levels are detected, off-site personnel can be notified straight away to take immediate action and prevent costly machine downtime. The Movicon.NExT SCADA solution allows them to manage and optimize their processes.