Food and Beverage Category: Zenith Awards Finalists
Sponsored by Siemens
Profibus International Competence Centre and Tooheys
Project: Tooheys can line
Neo Vista Integra Systems and CSIRO
Project: PlantScan
Industrial Conveying
Project: ICA SKU
SAGE Automation
Project: National Manufacturing Information System
Zi-Argus
Project: Boags Brewery Modernisation and Expansion
Company: Profibus International Competence Centre and Tooheys
Project: Tooheys can line
Location: Lidcombe, New South Wales
Toohey’s turned to Tyco Flow Control, Australia’s first accredited Profibus International Competence (PICC) after releasing its production line was suffering difficulties.
The company has 1500 beer cans rolling off the production line every minute at its Lidcombe facility in New South Wales.
The facility was in dire need of a robust automation system, despite the company’s extensive Profibus experience, one of Tooheys can lines set up a year ago had encountered a host of problems which needed outside intervention.
PICC Automation Engineer deployed the powerful ProfiTrace analysis tool and defined three problem areas; incorrect run lengths, wrong segmentation and poor terminations.
The first step was to fix the two repeaters and the ProfiHub so it didn’t exceed the specified lengths.
Under the company’s guidance, the ProfiHub was installed in the middle of the line with the spurs driven off that hub while ensuring the drop lines did no exceed 150 metres in total as specified in Profibus.
The Huber was also able to analyse faulty terminations which were a problematic due to the water ingress.Once this issue was fixed, the can line finally stepped into gear, eighteen months after it was commissioned.
Another major benefit that Profibus delivered was the ability to decentralise the safety system using the ProfiSafe protocol which was integrated and configured very easily. ProfiSafe allowed the Tooheys team to pick up emergency spikes up to category 4 level.
Company: CST Wastewater Solutions and Bluetongue Brewery
Project: Recycled water treatment plant/ green energy plant for Blue Tongue Brewery
Location: Warnervale, New South Wales
Pacific Beverages’ new Bluetongue Brewery features a water recovery plant, which targets best-practice water reuse standards.
The plant also provides renewable energy for the brewery, reducing its dependence on fossil fuels.
The system was designed for food and beverage plants and was installed by a partnership of CST Wastewater Solutions and Global Water Engineering.
Pacific Beverages is a joint venture by Coca-Cola Amatil and global brewer SABMiller has ensured the brewery will boast strict environmental standards and water and energy savings.
The wastewater passes through several pre-treatment steps before entering a GWE ANUBIX-B anaerobic methane reactor in which the wastewater’s organic content (COD) is digested by bacteria in a closed reactor, degrading the compounds and converting them into valuable biogas and cleaned effluent.
Biogas from the process is collected and reused as renewable energy to power the brewery’s boiler.
Treated effluent continues to an aerobic post-treatment stage in which organic content is further reduced by GWE’s proprietary MEMBROX Membrane Biological Reactor (MBR) system.
In the water polishing step, the water from the MBR unit is sent through a Reverse Osmosis (RO) installation.
The effluent is then led to a disinfection and storage unit, where the recycled water is kept for reuse applications.
Company: Frucor and CST Wastewater Solutions
Project: Vertical screws for Frucor Beverages plant at Manukau city
Location: Manukau, New Zealand
The project involves a compact vertical screen has been installed by Frucor, to remove the solid debris from factory wastewater before its discharge into the sewer.
The company chose the vertical screen from CST Wastewater Solutions as an ideal solution for the needs of the factory where the space was confined and there wasn’t room for bulkier equipment.
It provides the company with an automated process that requires far less labour than the previous ‘flat’ screen method, which necessitated regular removal of the screens by forklift, followed by hand cleaning.
The screen is positioned between the below-ground sedimentary sump and the main sump, which both hold wastewater from the enter plant at the Manukau City site.
After the screen has removed solid material from the wastewater, its pH corrected and discharged into the sewer.
The solids are mainly fruit pulp, but also include extraneous debris such as plastic bottle caps and hairnets. This material is discharged into a bin for disposal.
The biggest benefit for Frucor is in terms of labour saved. Vertical screens are more or less automatic and maintenance free, making them very cost-effective.
The function is controlled by the wastewater level, so that the screw switches on when the water rises.
Company: Neo Vista Integra Systems and CSIRO
Project: PlantScan
Location: Black Mountain, Australian Capital Territory
The high resolution Plant Phenomics Centre located at CSIRO Plant industry in Canberra, in association with Neo Vista System Integrators in Sydney, have developed a next generation phenotyping platform called PlantScan.
PlantScan is design to capture information on plant structure and function on an industrial scale, enabling the discovery of new traits and the selection of varieties for tomorrow’s agriculture.
The system is composed of double conveyor belt, manually loaded, with plants held in position on pot carriers.
Individual plants are identified by bar code; it is a first transfer station that diverts the plant to a split conveyor belt, which accurately positions the plant for imaging using laser proximity sensors.
A rotating motor is then fitted with an incremental encoder with up to 65,536 lines per revolution and mounted on a scissor-lift platform, which ensures the plant is scanned from every angle.
A top-imaging system complements the 3D information collected from the sides. After imaging, the plant is conveyed to a second transfer station before being ejected by an actuator onto a double gravity belt.
Plants are then manually unloaded and transported back to their growing environments. All motion control and image acquisition was designed in LabView.
The interface was built in a hybrid 32- and 64-bit architecture, which automatically detects the various sensors available to the instrument and provides the user with all configuration options available for specific sensors.
Company: Industrial Conveying
Project: ICA SKU
Location: Nationwide
Industrial Conveying’s Project Design department has devised a flexible automated stock keeping unit (SKU) order collating and palletising system, which can be directly linked to production or utilised in distribution warehouses for order assembly and dispatch of packaged food products.
The system is tailored for any company with limited, or hundred of SKUs and is applicable for any packaged goods requiring distribution.
The project involves integrating any combination of Industrial Conveying’s technologies including robots, gantries, layer picking, layer transfer and disassembly, cassette loading, sortation and palletising.
The order assembly system is directly linked to production, which means the product is only handled once, thereby eliminating the requirement of bulk palletising of products after production.
In some instances it can eliminate the need to store in warehouse and picking sequence, thereby generally lowering SKU inventory.
The system speeds up production facilities or warehouses that survive on multiple stock picking, shaving time off distribution of multi-orders.
The company’s system offers a fully automated approach to eliminate manual order consolidation.
Company: SAGE Automation
Project: National Manufacturing Information System
Location: Australia: 5 Cities, 7 Sites, 38 Production Lines
SAGE Automation worked with the largest bottler of ready-to-drink beverages in the Asia-Pacific region and one of the word’s top five bottlers within their global organisation.
The organisation needed a manufacturing information system that would provide visibility into the performance of all machines on all lines in the country.
SAGE was involved with a customer called Activplant, which measures the performance of a production process against targets and identifies areas for improvement to alleviate.
Activplant measures the performance of a production process against targets and identifies areas for improvement to alleviate bottlenecks and maximise output.
The outcome was a process improvement solution resulting in more products for les effort and cost.
Through research, Activplant’s Throughput Analyser (TPA) was born which is based on the Theory of Constraints (TOC), an overall management philosophy that is geared to help organisations continually achieve their goal.
Activplant and SAGE decided to pilot the new solution, which had been modified to accommodate rate based technologies like food and beverage, fill and pack.
The project enables all operators and managers to identify the current production performance of any machine or line in the country.
Company: Zi-Argus
Project: Boags Brewery Modernisation and Expansion
Location: Tasmania
James Boag was purchased by Lion Nathan, which quickly noted the need for a Standard Automation Philosophy to underpin ongoing significant capital investments, to re-develop and improve production facilities at its major sites.
While much of the focus of the brewing process has been on standardising batch process control, alignment to the S88 standard & robust engineering practices has provided vehicle for uniformly implementing similar solutions to different processes within the sites.
Zi-Argus implemented these concepts at the Boags site for Brewhouse, Filtration and Bright Beer production areas.
The project team used GE’s iBatch v5.1 and iFix v5.0 as the top end batching and visualisation systems and multiple PLCs as the workhorse to satisfy the backbone processing requirements.
For all information and data storage requirements Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 was used.
By designing 50 batch process units within the system to control around 200 I/O, the Zi-Argus project team has delivered the ideal solution for the new DE Candlestick filtration line, extended existing Bright Beer storage tank farm, associated CIP systems and various transfer lines.
The company’s role in the project provided a fully designed integrated software and hardware package to Boags.
Company: Mining Families Foundation of Australia Pty Ltd
Project: Mining Families.com for a better growing, garden pot
Location: Western Australia
The project involves Mining Families Foundation of Australia manufacturing improved food growing garden pot plant from recycled materials in mine sites.
Mine sites can generate lots of waste from aluminium beverage cans to a range of plastics, in particular polypropylene used for catering food and process chemical delivery.
The pot plant works by expanding and contracting matt black aluminium flat band with the heat of the day and the cool of the night ratchets the plant pot at the approximate rate of one revolution per two weeks.
The speed of the rotation can be enhanced by increasing the length of the band with more than one circumference of matt aluminium flat band material.
The rotating pot sits in an extra large under tray of water, providing water for the plant over an extended period of some weeks if needed.
Over an indicative two week period it provides the pot with near-uniform sun influence on the plant in a 360 degree situation.
The technology used is a solar powered energy capture and application package.
Sponsored by Siemens
For over 135 years, Siemens has been providing innovative technology-based solutions in the areas of water, energy, environment, healthcare, productivity, mobility, safety and security. Through these eight solution areas, Siemens is meeting the demands placed on businesses by the four global megatrends – climate change, demographic change, globalisation and urbanisation.