Furnace Control System

Furnace control system for roller hearth furnace used for glass manufacturing.

The retro fit PC based system was designed to replace ageing and unreliable equipment used for roller hearth glass furnace control and monitoring.

The system provides a recipe mechanism that allows the operators to simply select a firing cycle for the next production run. It also gave the engineers control over many different aspects of the process including defining the temperatures for twelve zones and the drive speeds.

Four modes of control were used; dormant, warm-up, select auto, and run auto. In dormant the system is set into a safe mode where all furnace control outputs are turned to their off states and alarm checking is disabled. The warm-up cycle is used to allow the furnace to be heated up prior to running. Select auto allows the operator to chose the firing cycle recipe and a relevant set of alarm limits for the process. When the run auto stage is entered, the selected firing cycle recipe is used by the control routines to determine the temperature required in each zone.

KEY BENEFITS

• Cost effective extension of furnace life cycle
  
• Improved reports for QC
• Unlimited firing cycle recipes
   

During all stages except dormant, the system checks the furnace control drive speeds, temperatures, limit switches etc., against the defined limits and in the event of a problem will notify the operator through the alarm display and using three different audible annunciators.

Prodigy software is flexible and cost effective making it ideal for any level of industrial control and monitoring.

If you have an application and would like more information please contact us.