To enable the introduction of a new lower priced product, Power + Energy needed to upgrade its existing hydrogen purification systems by reducing the machines’ cost and by further improving reliability.
Most importantly, drawing on customer experience, Power + Energy wanted to upgrade and modernize the controls systems that had been used on earlier models. Power + Energy required that the engineering software in the new machine design needed to be easy to use so as to minimise engineering development time and training costs. Power + Energy therefore looked to Siemens Factory Automation products for solutions.
Application:
PE 9000MZ and PE9000C ranges of hydrogen purifiers
Description:
Power + Energy purifiers use advanced micro-channel palladium membrane technologies to purify industrial grade hydrogen to 99.9999999% purity. Individual impurities such as H2O, O2, N2, CH4, etc are reduced to less than 100 parts-pertrillion (ppt). This ultra-pure hydrogen is required by companies involved in new, high growth industries including manufacturers of Light Emitting Diodes, power semiconductors and some photovoltaic and silicon semiconductor products as well as by providers of hydrogen fuel for fuel cell electric vehicles.
Key Business Activities:
Power+Energy Hydrogen Gas Purifiers supply Ultra High Purity Hydrogen gas for pointof-
use and bulk gas purification applications.
Chosen products for this project:
Power + Energy decided to use the S71214 PLC and TP700 Comfort Panel HMIs.These products provided the cost, features and reliability that proved to be a good fit for the redesigned machines. Critically these devices can also be configured, programmed and commissioned with a single engineering software package, the TIA Portal.
The main feature that Power and Energy stated helped them in the redesign of this machine was the integration of the PLC, HMI and Networking devices within a single engineering software package.
With integrated software, the tag handling between the PLC and HMI was simple and less error prone than earlier competitive packages. Power + Energy found the software was well laid out, and intuitive to use, especially with the drag and drop features between the editors. With the Device and Networks editor it was easy to connect devices and get them to communicate with each other. Within the programming editors, the Help system provided easy guidance to help on all instructions, and the use of Function blocks allowed for easy reuse and structuring of code. When commissioning the machine the software provided easy guidance to any fault information.
