E.D.&A.
› Applications › Nitrogen generator
E.D.&A.
Controller for a nitrogen generator
Specialist in the high technology manufacture of membrane filters that separate nitrogen and oxygen from the air. These hollow fibre filters are, among other things, incorporated in nitrogen generators that are sold world-wide.
Description development / required specifications
The complete control and operation of the nitrogen generators are carried out by an E.D.&A V5 HPC® controller.
Among other things the nitrogen generators are used to reduce the fire risk in computer rooms. These appliances also have their use in petro-chemical and other production processes.
In detail
If you think about the application of microcontrollers in an industrial environment you often only think about the control part. It turns out however, that the user interface and data communication within a controller is playing increasingly a more powerful role.
This consideration also turned out to be the starting point for a Dutch customer to develop a new product together with E.D.&A. The customer develops, produces and sells nitrogen generators based on hollow fibre membrane technology, where compressed air is separated into flows of enriched nitrogen and oxygen.
The High Performance Controller (HPC®) V5 with touch screen was chosen to drive the nitrogen generator. The front panel has been customised, which integrated the controller perfectly into the customer's equipment. The user is able to get a good insight into the production process due to a user friendly, flexible and easy to follow arrangement. It is also possible to drive the production process with the HPC®. Due to the large market requirement for this nitrogen generator the language can be displayed in Dutch, English, German, French and Spanish.
The capacity of the system can be increased by placing several nitrogen generators in parallel on the same compressed air pipe. To obtain mutual synchronization, one nitrogen module is set up as the master and the others as slave units. The whole process is driven and controlled from the master unit. In this way, among other things, the status of the slave units can be examined from the master and in various situations switched on and off.
Data communication between these modules occurs via a RS485 connection with the MODBUS RTU communication protocol. Optionally, a 10BASE-T Ethernet network can be chosen. By using ethernet the unit can be linked in most cases to the existing network cables. Use is then made of the TCP/IP protocol via ethernet.
The end result of this development was a complete product, which is highly valued by end customers. The use of the system generated ideas, like for example, the possibility of visualizing and driving the production process from a PC in the office. For this purpose the screens of the nitrogen module were adapted for a PC application, which in turn made use of a modem to address the HPC in the field. The project which started off with the development of a simple controller application subsequently developed into a powerful control system combining a user and data communication interface.
