Foxboro helps pulp mill switch over 1,000 I/O points in three hours

Staff -- Control Engineering, 10/1/2003

Foxboro, MA— Invensys Foxboro reports that the world's leading producer of bleached eucalyptus pulp, Aracruz Celulose, recently set a new industry record by completing the physical switchover of more than 1,000 I/O points from a legacy Fisher-Provox control system to a modern I/A Series automation system in just three hours and seven minutes. This control system migration was performed with the assistance of Invensys' migration experts at Aracruz Celulose's Fiberline B evaporation unit at the company's world-scale pulp mill (Espirito Santo state, Brazil). Foxboro is a unit of Invensys plc (London, UK).

"This sets a clear record for Foxboro, and, to the best of our knowledge, for any controls vendor at any customer site anywhere in the world," says Mike Caliel, Invensys Process Systems' president.

The automation upgrade was performed using Foxboro's system migration approach. This method uses special I/O modules that are functionally identical to ordinary I/A Series modules, but are repackaged to plug into the existing Fisher-Provox, or other vendors,' I/O racks. These I/O modules enable the physical switchover to be accomplished without moving any field wiring, which dramatically minimizes production downtime.