The leading manufacturer of the catalysts, Johnson Matthey, located in a town Royston in United Kingdom, is active also in chemical industry and catalysts coatings and enrichments processing, among others. Along new developed SCRF coating they still produce the catalysts with the CSF coating, which includes platinum. Due to bigger and bigger demand also for this type of catalysts they had to extend the production. The catalysts production begins with mixing of the metals as copper, zinc, aluminium, various minerals, platinum, rhodium, iridium and other additives with water. Such washcoat is then applied to the ceramic block channels with the help of the vacuum. The ceramic block is made of magnesium, iron and silicate minerals.

Our experiences in the batching industry again proven to be useful, as the challenge by this project was the extent of the wanted production, as it consists of more than 40 units/tanks. We had to use the solution developed within the SCRF project.

In the company Inea we again used many times tested and proved approach of phase logic in the Allen Bradley PLC in the combination with batch manager Wonderware InBatch and Wonderware AchestrA/InTouch Scada system. This time the approach was improved with the new features and higher degree of standardization. Whole solution is again based on officially approved batching standard S88.

We conceptually designed the batch process with units, connections, segments, equipment and phases, and then program the process in the PLC. Again we developed the simulator of the whole process, which is very useful for testing and debugging. The simulator was also used for the FAT testing with the costumer, and they further use it as learning and experimenting environment. In parallel with the PLC development we designed the batch model and wrote the test recipes in the InBatch environment, prepared Scada screens of the process and wrote the functional specifications. We successfully completed FAT testing with a lot less problems as by the SCRF project. After that we started the commissioning of all devices and processes included in the production, which again took relatively long time, first due to extent of the production and additionally due to customer’s unreadiness. All things went well, the customer was pleased with new implementation in the United Kingdom, and Inea was hoping for new similar projects.

The process was again complemented despite previous experiences, due to quite big mechanical problems with some parts of the production, and we again considered and implemented costumer’s changes.