Page 41 - trends in automation

Efficiency over several levels of the automation pyramid:
Treatment plant for tannery wastewater in León, Mexico.
L éon, an industrial city with approxi-
mately one million inhabitants,
is considered to be the world
­capital of leather and shoes. Inter-
national brands such as Adidas, Nike and
Caterpillar have their products made in
600 tanneries and 1,000 shoe and leather
factories. This generates tonnes of waste-
water, which requires special treatment.
Besides organic tanning agents, the
­wastewater from the factories may also
­contain salts and metals such as chrome,
­zirconium, aluminium, titanium and iron,
together with synthetic tanning agents
such as formaldehyde and phenols.
Efficiency built on experience
Fypasa has been building and operating
wastewater treatment plants throughout
Mexico since 1969 and currently handles
40 per cent of all of the country’s waste-
water. In 2009, the company built a puri-
fication plant for tannery wastewater in
León which it has operated since. It did
this by expanding an existing plant for
household wastewater, which was previ-
ously also used for tannery wastewater.
In the long term, however, the latter
proved insuffi­cient for the needs of the
developing industrial city. A greater de-
gree of automation was the key to increas-
ing the plant’s ­efficiency. “Since we are
not specialists in plant automation, we
rely on the experience of Festo’s project
engineers,” ex-plains Mauricio Plascencia,
Operations Manager of the Fypasa treat-
ment plant in León. Festo developed a
complete solution covering everything
from the sensor/­actuator level through to
the field level, the individual control level
and the process control level, including a
SCADA process visualisation system.
Festo thus made things as simple as pos-
sible for Fypasa throughout the project
value chain.
Festo present from the outset
“Starting with the engineering phase, ­
we supplied Fypasa with a suitable auto­
mation concept, including circuit dia-
grams, CAD data and 3D models of the
process valves and control cabinets, the
central components of the sensor/actu­
ator and field ­levels so that they could be
included in its designs as ready-to-install
units,” says Eduardo Poupard, Project
Engineer with Festo Mexico. Festo was
able to ­tdemon-strate to Fypasa that it
had sufficient experience, based on
many other projects in the field of water
and wastewater treatment, and a good
understanding of the processes involved
in a wastewater treatment plant to devel-
op a solution which meshed perfectly
with the plant design.
Tests save time for the operator
The purchasing phase was completed
­efficiently thanks to the project manage-
ment provided by Festo engineers, with
activity charts and definitions of mile­
stones. The installation phase was sim-
plified with the simulation tests of the
process valves and the control cabinets
in the Festo Test Centre, the product
2.2013 trends in automation
Synergies 40 – 41