In a few weeks, the global ethanol industry will gather at the annual Siemens Automation in Boca Raton, FL June 26-29, 2017. The annual Automation Summit is a user conference for manufacturing professionals who use Siemens automation technologies.   Trident Automation will be among Siemens Solution Partners sharing its experiences  with latest technical developments in DCS design and installation. As part of the three-day event, Trident CEO Jason Hurst will present a case study on how Trident did a total system replacement in under 60 hours.

Marquis Energy is the largest dry-mill ethanol facility in the United States with a production capacity of about one million gallons of fuel grade ethanol per day. Marquis Energy contracted Trident Automation to completely replace the APACS+ system with PCS 7, implement smart fieldbus technology, leverage the PCS 7 APL configuration library; all while utilizing a SiVaaS virtualized system architecture.

“The lessons learned in a DCS migration of this size can apply to smaller ethanol plants as well,” Hurst said. “In the 15 years we’ve been supporting the ethanol industry, we’ve learned that every project is highly customized to that plant’s systems and needs.” In order to upgrade the system in just over one weekend, Trident teams collaborated with Marquis Energy to design the system specifically to the plant’s needs and to plan the installation to reduce production downtime.

Since the system upgrade, the plant has added five PCS 7 4x4x1 MPC blocks and continued improvements around alarm management.

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