KIMA Echtzeitsysteme has released a new significantly enhanced version of its advanced control systems platform “SmartControl”.

As first customer HOLCIM has used the new system in 2011 to control rotary kilns. Due to good experiences in the past four years, where Holcim already employed more than 30 systems to control ball mills and vertical roller mills, at the beginning of 2011 the company decided to implement their own new kiln control strategy on the new enhanced SmartControl platform.

During this process KIMA programmed some special building blocks according to the customer’s needs and trained HOLCIM’s employees in the usage of SmartControl. KIMA’s fast and efficient support enabled quick progress of the project.

The new implemented kiln control strategy was first tested against a simulated kiln. The first real application of this strategy was performed at the plant in Prachovice in spring 2011, the second in Campulung in summer 2011. Availability of the system was required to be at least 96 %, which was clearly exceeded. Running experience shows, that the performance of one system is sufficient to control one kiln and up to 4 mills. After successful finalization of a 6-month test period SmartControl was approved by HOLCIM as a platform for implementation of kiln- and mill-control systems.

SmartControl provides a large series of “building blocks” (digital filters, predictors, closed loop controllers, fuzzy-expert systems, control flow, ...) which can be combined in order to form sophisticated closed loop control systems for process industries. Handling of these blocks is very easy, mainly by graphical manipulation and parameterization of “blocks”.
Besides these basic buildings blocks, several predefined complex control strategies are available, e.g. for:

• Ball mills (Cement, Raw material, Coal, Ore...)
• Vertical roller mills
• Roller presses
• Hot gas generators

SmartControl is running under Windows on IBM server hardware, which is connected to the plant’s PLCs via OPC-protocol. Communication and operation is performed transparently via the existing SCADA of the plant, or by SmartControl’s easy to use visualization.