Shin-Etsu Chemicals to use Experion PKS to upgrade VC plant

Phoenix, AZ – Japanese based Shin-Etsu Chemicals announced March 6th it will use Honeywell’s Experion PKS to begin a plant wide re-instrumentation of its VC (vinyl chloride) plant in the Netherlands.

Shin Etsu acquired the 550,000 tons per year VC plant in late 1999 from Akzo Nobel N.V. and Shell Chemicals. Originally constructed in the 1970’s, the VC plant uses a mixture of controls from pneumatic to Honeywell TPS distributed control system. The first phase of Shin-Etsu’s re-instrumentation project is being coordinated with a plant capacity increase project that adds a fourth process furnace.

Ab de Muijnck, Akzo Nobel’s consultant and senior project engineer for the re-instrumentation project, explained, ”Phase one consists of installing approximately 110 FOUNDATION fieldbus devices and 50 traditional 4-20 mA safety and analyzer devices to Experion PKS C200 controllers for the new furnace. We also intend to use Profibus to interface the furnace’s motor control center devices.”

As part of the 800,000 EU total project, Honeywell’s Amsterdam office will receive about 250,000 EU to provide project-related engineering, commissioning, and startup services.

”We were very careful in our evaluation of control systems,” said Shin-Etsu maintenance engineer Leen van der Reiden. ”We wanted a system that went beyond providing operators data about alarms and instrument diagnostics. After examining Honeywell’s Experion PKS it became apparent the knowledge Honeywell had gained from its work with the Abnormal Situation Man-agement Consortium was very well reflected in Experion PKS’s ability to provide operators informed knowledge about what’s happening.”

Scheduled to have the new furnace on-line by October 2003, Shin-Etsu is already making plans to re-instrument 350 control valves and 1,500 sensor/transmitters as part of the next phase of its plant modernization project.

For more information, visit www.acs.honeywell.com

Control Engineering Daily News DeskDave Harrold, Senior Editor dharrold@reedbusiness.com

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