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Problem: Customer had ten ovens with 1980’s technology. None of the ovens were networked together and there were no drawings for most of the ovens. Over the decades, multiple minor wiring modifications had turned each enclosure into a bird’s nest of unintelligible wiring. When something went wrong, it took maintenance hours to troubleshoot. 

Solution: NSI upgraded the entire control system and chose to use the Eurotherm Nanodac, adding power monitoring with the M-System 53U power meter, networking all the ovens together and displaying all SP’s, PV,s and alarms on a centralized 15” Weintek OIT, generating a powerful local notification system using the M-System IT60SRE Modbus TCP driven stacklight , providing a cloud based historian and remote alarming using a SCADACore Viacell edge device and tying everything together with Eurotherms’ ‘out-of-the-box’ oven SCADA system.  All of this had to be done for a budget that wouldn’t break the bank.

The Nanodac is a large I/O count two loop controller with built-in setpoint profiling, function block programming, encrypted data logging and Modbus TCP communications.

Three CT’s were added to each oven and connected to the M-System 53U power meter, which has a Modbus RTU interface.  This was connected to a Lantronix converter, thus providing a Modbus TCP interface, allowing massive amounts of power data to be extracted, stored and analyzed.

The Weintek display is used as a central operator station to show profile status, alarms and current oven temperatures for all ten of the ovens.

The M-System IT60SRE Modbus TCP stacklight was delivered with four lights. Each light can be off, solid or flashing and all driven by Modbus commands.  This gives the operator a wealth of available messages using combinations of lights and light states and all done with just power wiring and a Cat5 cable.  This again, reduces installation time and materials and subsequently cost.   

The SCADACore Viacell communicates to all ten Nanodacs over Modbus TCP and sends status, temperature and alarm information to the cloud.  This is used as a back-up historian and to alert supervisors to any alarms.

The Eurotherm Oven SCADA system automatically recognizes the Nanodac controller and all relevant parameter addresses are pre-programmed.  With its pre-built graphical interfaces, this means that a complete SCADA system can de developed in a day and commissioned over a second day thus reducing the project costs drastically.

During the installation process, all the surplus wiring was removed, remaining wiring tidied up and traced.  ‘As-built’ AutoCAD drawings were then developed and delivered to the customer as part of the sign-off package.