GranBio Investimentos SA is a Brazilian industrial biotech company that was born out of the vision of bringing about a green revolution through the construction of second-generation ethanol plants that will produce cheap, clean-burning biofuel from readily available biomass. Following its establishment in June 2011 by Gran Investimentos S.A., a holding company in which the Gradin family are the primary investors, the company built Bioflex 1, the first commercial second-generation ethanol plant in the Southern Hemisphere. Bioflex 1 started operation in early 2014 and is able to produce 82 million liters of biofuel per annum, making it one of the largest such facilities in the world.

As the main automation contractor (MAC) for the Bioflex 1 project, Yokogawa South America was involved from the front end engineering design (FEED) stage, performing the basic design for a control system and field instrumentation solution that will reduce costs and improve production efficiency throughout the lifecycle of the plant. Yokogawa installed the CENTUM VP integrated production control system; the csTUNER control loop tuning software; the CENTUM VP Batch package to control the plant’s pretreatment, enzymatic hydrolysis, fermentation, and distillation/separation units; field instruments including FOUNDATION™ fieldbus-enabled ADMAG AXF magnetic flowmeters, DPharp EJA series pressure/differential pressure transmitters, and control valves; and the Plant Resource Manager (PRM) asset management package. Yokogawa South America was responsible for product delivery, engineering, and operator training.

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Case Study by Advantech: Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) have become a necessary tool in providing visible and controllable management for the manufacturing industry. However, expanded product portfolios, growing product complexity and increasing globalization are propelling the need to update traditional MES so as to effectively manage evolving challenges. In terms of food processing and manufacturing, the complex process needs Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to fully monitor and control production line while maximizing the effectiveness of MES functions. Advantech not only offers a variety of hardware products to take on the important task of data collection in the production line but also provides software platform to serve as a data gateway between the front-end equipments and MES application. Through this total solution, System Integrators can design the required management systems for food processing and manufacturing factories, and food manufacturers can upgrade their existing manual work into the paperless and automated operation, thus establishing product traceability system to achieve the goal of safe manufacturing.

Advantech has extensive product lines to meet the software and hardware needs of System Integrators and food processing factories. Taking WebAccess as the core, our cost-effective solution can reduce developers’ costs and time while accelerating the speed of system implementation. For food industry, complete data collection, screen display with friendly and graphical user interface, real-time statistics and historical analysis reports, cross-platform and mobile management, all of these characteristics facilitate manufacturing processes more transparency and openness to prevent malpractice while letting users properly solve the abnormal problem at the first moment, and thus indeed doing food safety checks.

Case Study: NEP Solar is a leading developer and supplier of concentrating solar thermal collectors for industrial processes, solar cooling and cogeneration. NEP Solar’s PolyTrough collectors generate heat at up to 400° C at high efficiency and at competitive cost. Being able to be roof top mounted allows the NEP Solar solution to be integrated into otherwise unused area.

The roof of the Emmi Tête de Moine cheese factory in picturesque Saignelégier, which is at an elevation of 1,000m in Switzerland’s Jura mountain range, is now covered with 627m2 of concentrating solar mirrors in the form of 17 NEP Solar PolyTrough 1,800 collectors. The sun tracking concentrated solar solution was awarded a 2013 Swiss Solar Award.

On sunny summer days, the collectors can generate up to 360 kW of concentrated solar energy. This heats a fluid that is used to provide process heat directly to the plant, meeting over 50% of the daily heat demand of the dairy process. Provided in the form of thermal energy rather than electricity, the energy can be directly used for the plant’s process heat requirements without loss through conversion. This achieves 60% efficiency, significantly higher when compared to conversion to electrical energy, and allows excess heat captured to be stored for use when the sun is not shining.

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Case Study by Yokogawa: Enel S.p.A. is an Italian electric utility company, the second-largest in Europe by market capitalization. Formerly a state-owned monopoly, it is now partially privatized with Italian government control: the largest shareholder is the Italian Ministry of Economy & Finance (31.244%).

The current big concern of the Enel Generation and Energy Management (GEM) division invested plan is to improve plant efficiency and reduce environmental impact. To reach these objectives, a program was started to convert the existing oil-fuelled power plants to gas-fueled combined-cycle plants. The combined-cycle power plant (CCPP) at Santa Barbara was converted and operated in 2007. This CCPP is capable to generate 400MW electricity and it covers the peak demand of electricity within the national grid. The CCPP consists of one gas turbine STG5-400F(V94.3A) from Siemens, one heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) from Ansaldo Caldaie, and steam turbine from Ansaldo Energia.

Yokogawa successfully installed CENTUM CS3000 production control system (PCS) to manage nearly 6000 I/Os and 10,000 I/Os from 25 sub-systems through OPC interface. And Enel GEM challenges field digital technology for their predictive maintenance in their asset management system.

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