News

Case Study: New system in and running in four hours

Louis Dreyfus Commodities operates an ethanol plant in Norfolk, Nebraska. The plant needed a new operating system, but could not afford to lose any production time. Trident worked with plant managers to design a system and process that could be installed during a scheduled 3-day outage. For 12 weeks, teams did pre-engineering work in Wisconsin with installation designed to take hours instead of days. On site, engineers removed an APACS DCS, then installed a customized cabling system to use existing […] Read More

Case Study: Collaboration with Siemens produces replacement controls

The Marquette Board of Light and Power is a municipal electric utility serving approximately 17,000 customers in the city of Marquette nine townships in Marquette County, Michigan. They commissioned a replacement control system and burner management system for their 50mw plant. Trident collaborated with our partner, Siemens, to design a control system for the plant, but our team members were on start for installation and start-up. During start-up, we were called on to trouble-shoot and adjust the system to maximize […] Read More

Case Study: Total DCS migration in under 60 hours

When you’re one of the largest ethanol plants in the United States, a system upgrade could present a serious production problem in terms of losing thousands of dollars a day in income. But Marquis Energy trusted Trident Automation to do just that—amazingly, in only 60 hours. Marquis Energy, located in Hennepin, Illinois, is the largest dry-mill ethanol facility in the country with a production capacity exceeding 300 million gallons per year. The plant was constructing a second 100+ million gallon […] Read More

Case Study: Deadline drives creative solutions in DCS installation for Elkhorn Valley Ethanol

There’s nothing like a critical deadline to spark creative engineering solutions. Trident was given only 3 days to install and startup a new DCS for Elkhorn Valley Ethanol plant. The project had more than 1,500 I/O connections that would require hours of painstaking installation and testing. Trident’s teams estimated it could take about a week to wire the system—and they only had a little over two days. That’s when inspiration hit Trident founder Jerry Wenzel. “There were literally thousands of […] Read More