Challenge: Produce More Within Energy and Cost Constraints
A leading international supplier of high-performance minerals to the polymer and coatings markets wanted to increase production while avoiding costly capital investments.
The company leverages a wide range of minerals including calcium carbonates, clays, and kaolins to make technical products that are essential for many industries. Its principal markets include construction and building, lawn care and landscaping, paints and coatings, plastics and films, and sealants and adhesives.
The value of the company’s high performance minerals lies in the specialized processes and people they use to transform minerals to add performance. Many of these processes have been developed by and are unique to the company with resulting value-add to their customers.
The company recognized that energy related processes in their plants are major constraints to continuing to provide total customer value. In order to provide more calcium carbonate for its customers, the company identified bottlenecks and looked for ways to improve production efficiencies throughout its complex mineral drying process.
Solution: Rockwell Automation, The Right Ingredient for a Competitive Process
In researching how to maximize the productivity of existing assets, the company determined that eliminating bottlenecks within the minerals drying process at the site could increase the efficiency of the process and allow for significant production increases.
They turned to Rockwell Automation to help achieve new levels of operational consistency and stability throughout the drying process, while at the same time reducing energy consumption. The company engaged Rockwell Automation to deploy its Pavilion8®-based model predictive control (MPC) industrial analytics solution to one processing line, which consisted of filtration, drying, pulverizing and production classification. Pavilion8 is a modular software platform and the foundation for Rockwell Automation’s industry-specific solutions. Leveraging a powerful modeling engine at its core, Pavilion8 includes modules to control, analyze, monitor, visualize, warehouse and integrate that are combined into high-value applications.
