Mining, Minerals, Metals
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Schneider Electric CitectSCADA helps monitor and automate the world's largest supplier of diamonds
I. CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT / PROJECT CONTEXT
Customer profile:
Argyle Diamonds is the world's largest supplier of diamonds, producing approximately 30 million carats each year from its operations in the East Kimberley region, in the remote north of Western Australia. The company's production accounts for approximately one-quarter of the world's natural diamond production.
The Argyle Diamond mine is a fully automated, open cut mine, characterized by a high level of efficiency, safety and productivity, coupled with a commitment to quality management, a skilled workforce and state-of-the-art technology.
Argyle operates an open pit mine, alluvial mine and a processing plant 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each year some 80 million tonnes of material is extracted and the plant processes approximately 10 million tonnes of ore, liberating around 30 million carats (equivalent to 6 tonnes) of diamonds.
Customer objective and constraints:
Argyle Diamond's management needed to implement CitectSCADA to control and monitor the entire plant to provide information to Argyle Diamond Mine's personnel working at a number of operational and managerial levels around the plant. Using the information presented they can respond immediately to any problem in the mines operation.
II. SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION
Implementation methodology (main phases):
The V Model has been actually followed:
- Project Requirements
- Functional Specification
- Design Specification
- Coding
- Module Testing
- Integration Test
- System Test
Solution overview (services, products, systems, architectures...):
In August 2002, the latest version of the award-winning CitectSCADA software was installed at Argyle, together with a fully revamped configuration and totally new server hardware platform. This upgrade, engineered by the Citect Professional Services group based in Western Australia, involved a cutover to the new platform which was achieved over a scheduled 36 hour shutdown with no additional downtime.
The upgrade included totally integrating two hitherto detached systems on the site to achieve an overall system size of:
- 2,350 graphical pages
- 48,000 Variable tags
- 2,578 trends
- 10,800 Argdig alarms
- 6 I/O servers
- 2 RAT servers
- 2 file servers
- 30 Citect workstations
- 6 WAN workstations
- 46 PLCs
Advances in server hardware allowed for the existing 20 CitectSCADA servers to be rationalized to just 10 low profile units, whilst still keeping the server CPU utilization to an average of just 21%. Using its proven client-server architecture, the CitectSCADA software graphically displays and reports on every aspect of Argyle Diamond Mine's automated treatment process from ore screening and crushing, to diamond recovery and tailing, power generation, transmission and distribution.
III. RESULTS / ACHIEVEMENT
Customer benefits:
Schneider Electric/Citect solution enable Argyle to connect their staff to real-time information in ways that will support future business strategies and further enhance their production efficiency and profitability.
Schneider Electric differentiating values VS competitors:
Citect was chosen because of the sheer size of the Argyle project. Thirty-three PLCs were connected to a 40 workstation PC network. The workstations, which controlled and monitored 32,000 digital points, 12,000 analog words and 6,000 trends were connected with an Ethernet LAN.
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Key downloads & links
Solution breakdown
Citect SCADA System
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