Pope Engineering - Bill Pope, Managing Director

Specialising in the custom design of industrial processing solutions For the Te Puke blending plant I chose to use Control-It cards for five reasons 1. Flexibility 2. Cost 3. Robustness 4. Expandability 5. Reliability The chosen system was a Soft PLC (InControl) supplied from InTouch with an InTouch SCADA. Because we only had to buy one card at a time to expand I/O, (with no back plane, remote I/O or comms card) this made moving, expanding or changing the plant very easy. Because we had true distributed control we were able to reduce the cost of automation. With the cards close to the areas that they were controlling we were able to reduce the number of connectors, terminal blocks and cable duct sizes. We found the Control-It cards survived in a harsh environment extremely well and were tolerant of electrical noise(which in the beginning of the project was an unfortunate fact of life). The cards and control system controlled a 25kg bag packer, bulk bin packer, bulk bag packer, milling, blending and powder transport. There were 250 I/O points and two serial controls. Pope Engineering Services Ltd 1118 Victoria Rd Tauwhare  RD4 Hamilton New Zealand  Ph +64 27 484 0302  Fax 07 824 0802