Bottler: Better information integration, power monitoring
| PepsiAmericas Inc. bottles a wide range of beverages, including Pepsi. |
Data integration retrofit at PepsiAmericas’ Munster, IN, facility, was among recent projects undertaken by automation system integrator Opto-Solutions . That was the first PepsiAmerica site to adopt Opto 22 hardware, the integrator says.
‘ PepsiAmericas needed to communicate Munster facility data to SQL databases the same way they were doing it at the other locations,’ says Gary Kowaleski, project manager for PepsiAmericas. Anthony Dern, control engineer with Opto-Solutions, liked the flexibility of Opto 22’s Snap hardware family in sending and receiving data: ‘For instance, we could have designed PepsiAmericas system to share data via OPC server. It just so happens, however, that the company is doing a lot with Microsoft .Net applications. So in this case, we created a control strategy for the Snap Ultimate brain to serve data within the .Net framework. The .Net technologies don’t work quite as well with Snap Ethernet I/O, which is what made Munster’s switch to Ultimate necessary.’
Also at the Munster facility, Dern found that the installed Snap system was monitoring the facility’s Veris Industries meter, which, much like the meters found in garages or on the sides of private homes, connects to the main power cables and measures and records power usage in the form of kilowatts and kilowatthours. But as he began Munster’s upgrade to Snap Ultimate I/O, Dern discovered that monitoring at this particular facility included other systems, devices, and equipment-lights, pumps, Type J thermocouples, and suction and condensing compressors. As a result, the company was acquiring and delivering flow rates, temperature readings, equipment status, and other valuable enterprise data.
Opto-Solutions expects to provide a variety of energy management services, including likely installation of Snap systems at 10-15 additional PepsiAmericas bottling locations, after projects in Urbandale, IA; Oshkosh, WI; Chicago, IL; and Fargo, ND.
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Project participants
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—Edited by Mark T. Hoske , Control Engineering editor in chief
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