Morrison Bowmore's Auchentoshan distillery on the banks of the River Clyde, West of Glasgow, required a safety system on their stills to detect overpressures. Each Still has a vacuum and pressure sensor fitted The project involved implementing a monitoring and control system which also covered washback filling and emptying control functions. If the pressure in a Still goes too high or the vacuum too low, the steam supply to the Stills is switched off and the transfer pumps stopped. The system monitors the temperatures in the Still, the flow rate of the spirit Still run off together with the level and temperature in the Spirit Receivers as well as the percentage alcohol and temperature post condensers from each Still using a Canongate DensiCheck Tx instrument.

A SCADA system is used as the HMI to control the filling and emptying of the washbacks and it monitors various process variables within the Still House. An Allen Bradley SLC 5/05 PLC is used to control the plant items. The PLC is ethernet linked and utilises standard digital and analog I/O cards. The HMI is configured using Rockwell's RSView32 software tools using a client server architecture. The plant SCADA terminal is located in the Still House hazardous area and is connected to the server PC housed in the safe area via fibre optic cables.

The system was recently extended to include the Mash Tun monitoring with the selection of Cold water and Worts standby pumps along with full control of outlet valves and routing valves to the washbacks. A new CompactLogix PLC was installed with I/O along with an extr RSView Active Display Client (ADS) SCADA station linked in to the original SCADA system.