North British Distillery Automation

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Background

Canongate Technology has recently completed another control system on a distillery site in Scotland. North British Distillery chose Canongate to design and install a Still Automation system for their Distillery in the heart of Scotland's capital city.

The North British Distillery Co. has been distilling since 1887, producing grain spirit for blended whisky. They are the second largest Scotch Whisky grain distillery, producing over 1 million litres of alcohol per week.

Still Control Project

The new system has three main functions: automatic start-up, controlled sequential shutdown and emergency shutdown of the three Coffey Stills. The system controls 45 valves and 13 pumps via a combination of Profibus DP and PA networks, Allen-Bradley DeviceNet "flex i/o" and direct hard wiring. The additional functionality was facilitated by extending an existing Allen-Bradley PLC to control the automatic sequences and by adding a Pilz system to implement the emergency shutdown. The system is linked to an existing SCADA which has been extended to provide visualisation and control of the new functionality. The SCADA system allows initiation of automatic sequences as well as direct manual control of individual plant items. A comprehensive alarm system is also incorporated.