Making an All-in-One PLC Machine Easier to Use?

This post is brought to you by Unitronics.

Summary: Procesteh LTD is a Croatian company offering engineering solutions for the process industry; they strive to provide complete solutions for both hardware and software.  For one project, they were building the control platform for a soda pasteurization system at a beverage plant.  They selected the Unitronics UniStream 15-inch modular PLC+HMI.  This PLC offered powerful communications, a large, easy to use display and a variety of I/O options, as well as a innovative, single-environment software enabling reduced programming time.

“Main advantage was the big 15-inch HMI display for easy operator control which is very important in such applications.”

Procesteh LTD is a Croatian company that offers engineering expertise to the processing industry.  They strive to provide customers with complete solutions, designing and creating both software and hardware solutions in house.  Procesteh has had a lot of success in the food and beverage market, creating solutions for mixing, processing, bottling and labeling beverages among other things.

One application they worked on was building the equipment for soda pasteurization in a beverage plant.  Procesteh wanted to implement a PLC for process control on this application; a reliable PLC would ensure high quality pasteurization, which is vitally important in the food and beverage industry.  This PLC needed temperature inputs to monitor and control the pasteurization temperature and heat exchangers; it also required digital I/O to open and close valves and run the pumps that move soda through the pasteurization process.  Additionally, Procesteh wanted a PLC that could run with multiple different settings so that one PLC could control both the pasteurization and the Cleaning-In-Process (CIP) required in between pasteurizations.

Procesteh decided that they wanted to use an all-in-one PLC; they were looking for a large, high resolution HMI panel for the control system, to ensure that it was user friendly, and like the idea of combining this with the PLC.  Procesteh selected the UniStream 15.6-inch HMI panel with CPU and I/O modules for their project.  One engineer with Procesteh commented that a “main advantage was [the] big 15-inch HMI display for easy operator control which is very important in such applications”.  Additionally being able to select the HMI and I/O modules independently, while still combining all the elements into a single unit, made it easy to customize the system and tailor it to Procesteh’s specific needs.

The UniStream was easy to use, once installed in the field, and the application development process is very streamlined thanks to the all-in-one design.  The ladder logic, HMI design, and communication configuration are all programmed in a single software environment, UniLogic.  UniLogic offers features designed to reduce programming time, like user-designed function block and code reuse options.  Additionally, UniStream has webserver functionality, which is designed parallel to the HMI screens, so that everything visible on the physical unit can be viewed remotely.  This made remote monitoring and supervision of the pasteurization process very intuitive and user friendly.  Procesteh was impressed by Unitronics reliable brand, best-of-breed technical support, and excellent price-performance ratio.

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