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Nitriflex, a Brampac Group company, was founded in 1971 and has its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. A major supplier of special polymers and nitrile rubber with a wide range of products, the company has made a name for itself on the international market.
Nitriflex's plant was controlled by board instrumentation and legacy PLC/SCADA systems. To improve automation of its production processes, Nitriflex decided to upgrade to the CENTUM CS 3000 distributed control system (DCS). The reasons for this were as follows.
Nitriflex established clear targets before starting this modernization project.
After extensive information gathering on site, Yokogawa Brazil recommended an approach that focused on using automation to improve the company's competitiveness by reducing process variability (improving product quality) and making better utilization of critical raw materials (increasing yield).
Based on a prioritization of strategic issues that included the need to reduce process variability, achieve greater competitiveness, and lower costs by increasing production efficiency, the decision was made to conduct the project in the following phases.
1st phase - Monomer recovery: Optimizing process conditions to more efficiently recover all residual monomers from polymerization reactions and class A raw materials for this process.
2nd phase - Polymerization: Includes the full automation of solution preparation and reactor loading (automatic recipes) and optimization of the polymerization conditions (cynetic control) to improve quality and reduce cycles. This phase is scheduled to be completed in March 2011.
3rd phase - Advanced process control implementation: Inference and control of polymer quality variables such as conversion, composition, and molar mass. The main objective is to reduce the variation in the value of highly-aggregated-value polymers. Other objectives include improving productivity and reducing residual emissions to the environment.
A major improvement as a result of this project is that butadiene monomer recovery efficiency jumped from 76% to 98%. The estimated benefit to Nitriflex is US$2 million per year.
In addition, there were the following benefits for Nitriflex.
Speaking about this project, Luis Carlos, senior process engineer for Nitriflex, says, "We are very happy to be using Yokogawa's CENTUM CS 3000 to improve production. To meet the requirements of end users and compete in the global market, we will increase the agility of our production activities and improve product quality."He went on to say, "We are always thinking about sustainable manufacturing, and for this we need a strong partner like Yokogawa."
Luis Carlos
senior process engineer
Our distributed control system (DCS) enables automation and control of industrial processes and enhanced business performance. Over 10,000 plants entrust Yokogawa DCS to deliver their production goals.
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