Bottling - Keeping control of Robinson’s packaging facility

Robinson’s brewery is in the middle of Stockport. The packaging plant is some three miles away and processes bright beer from the brewery and many other breweries ready for filling casks, kegs or bottles on site. The plant is effectively a multi-product facility, each product requiring special handling and finishing and provides a complete packaging operation from road tanker to tank farm to bottle or keg or cask.

The facility has now completed a four-year upgrade project. Originally an old system was in use at the main brewery site, this was phased out when the operation moved three miles away to the new packaging site. This new facility includes a new tank farm with eleven new storage tanks installed, a new automatic computer controlled racker, new tanks for processing rough beer before racking, and a new Process Automation system. The process comprises tank farm control, beer processing to make optimum yeast count, achieved through a centrifuge, or addition of finings and dissolved sugar, making bright beer; this is then transferred over to the racking side of the plant under supervision of the SCADA system. Bottling line, Cask, and Keg line are fed on demand with processed beer through a single system, with special attention to beer condition throughout the process.

There are five SCADA workstations networked together; three are located in the process area, one in the Laboratory and one in the Packaging Manager’s office. The system is recipe based with product routing, tracking, reporting and alarm handling facilities to allow complete plant management and optimisation decisions to be made in real-time. Robinson’s own production planning manager is located at the brewery three miles away, having full access to the availability of tank capacity information, thereby allowing decisions to be made affecting brewing and rough-beer distribution.

The SCADA package was selected from a variety of distributors. However, one of the main selection criteria was the need for a flexible system with the application software providing facilities for managers and operators to use recipes and change process parameters. Routing, Conditioning, CIP and other procedures had to be very flexible owing to the wide variety of beers being processed. For an example of a typical screen please refer to the Recipe Menu; here parameters such as CO2 Pressure, Holding Temperature, Rousing Regime and a variety of Additions can be changed. The Process PLCs were standardised to provide rapid control with secure networking between the PLCs and from the PLC network to the SCADA system.

A strong decision-making factor was also the quality of service and support provided by the combination of System Integrator (ABM Limited), PLC (Allen-Bradley) and Visualisation (SolutionsPT-supplied Wonderware InTouch). This was made on the basis of the packaging plant staff being confident about on-going vendor support and ABM’s vast experience in the brewing industry.