Nesher Cement rolls with Modbus TCP, real-time control

Afcon Software and Electronics Ltd. used Modbus TCP for real-time communication in a project with the Nesher Cement plant. Nesher Cement is Israel's largest cement-making company with three plants in Haifa, Ramle, and Bet Shemesh. The company updated the technology used in all three plants by moving from outdated wet production lines to more efficient and environmentally safer dry lines.

By Control Engineering Staff October 1, 2008
Engineering-Driven Ethernet

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Afcon Software and Electronics Ltd . used Modbus TCP for real-time communication in a project with the Nesher Cement plant. Nesher Cement is Israel’s largest cement-making company with three plants in Haifa, Ramle, and Bet Shemesh. The company updated the technology used in all three plants by moving from outdated wet production lines to more efficient and environmentally safer dry lines.

Nesher Ramle has two dry lines that manufacture approximately 3.6 million tons of clinker and 5 million tons of cement per year. The SCADA/HMI system running the plant’s processes is Afcon’s P-CIM 7.50. Afcon’s Dart software is used for remote control and monitoring on mobile phones and handheld devices. P-CIM is responsible for production lines handling stone transportation, stacking/reclaiming, crushing, mixing, elevators, kiln, calcinatory, cooling, lab tests and storage, cement mills, grinders, mixers, transportation to storage, packaging and shipping, and more.

Afcon designed and integrated the new control and management project. The central control room has 35 operator workstations. Three servers for alarms, history and communications give support to another 25 workstations. Modbus TCP supports real-time communications in a system with approximately 85 PCs and 40,000 I/O points. Connections are running on fiber optics at network and I/O levels. Dart 3.71, working over MIRS Frame Relay, enables sending events, alarms and reports to operator or manager mobile phones in real time.

Related links and ONLINE extra on industrial Ethernet
More from the October 2008 Control Engineering supplement on Engineering-Drive Ethernet:

Real-time Ethernet Applications

Don’t Rip Out Your Legacy Network

Gigabit Ethernet: Is the Time Right?

-Nesher Cement rolls with Modbus TCP, real-time control (this article)
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