One of Brazil's largest producers of sugar products uses sugar cane crops to produce edible sugar and pure ethanol, and simultaneously generate electricity for internal use and distribution to the grid. The company's challenge is to increase its production capacity and ethanol production without significant new capital investments to meet the global demand for ethanol. (Based on the high level of competitiveness in ethanol production in Brazil, the company requires anonymity.)

The biggest driving force for such companies to expand in the industry lies in the rising prices of sugar products in the export market and the development of hybrid fuel vehicle engine technology. In this technique, ethanol can be used alone or in combination with gasoline in a certain ratio. Today, 90% of new cars in Brazil are equipped with engines that use mixed fuels, which account for about 20% of the vehicle's fuel supply. The gasoline sold in Brazil is basically a mixture of 20% ethanol and 80% gasoline.

Most of Brazil's ethanol is produced by a fermentation process that is fermented by yeast. This process consumes less energy in general than ethanol production from corn in the United States. The result is that Brazil's ethanol creates 8.2 times more energy than its production process, compared to 1.5 times the energy production of corn as a raw material.

Sugar cane is harvested manually or by machine and then transported to hundreds of distillation plants throughout the country via special trucks. These distillers are basically owned by large farms or farm unions and managed by them. The factories are located near the plantation site, mostly in the state of São Paulo.

In the milling plant, sugar cane is rolled to extract sugar cane juice, leaving bagasse – a fiber-rich residue. The juice is then fermented with yeast to decompose the sucrose into carbon dioxide and ethanol, which are then distilled to form aqueous ethanol. Bagasse is burned to provide heat for the distillation and drying process, even for power generation for factory use or for sale to other agencies.

Strategic automation

The business strategy of most sugar product manufacturers is to set up additional new milling plants to meet growing demand, and the company is interested in maintaining its existing milling plant at a high level of technology. Increase the effectiveness of existing assets. The company believes that improving the process automation will reduce downtime while improving quality, consistency and profitability. The company also requires management of production processes that track its products, from raw materials to batch processes, while detecting and analyzing batch processing efficiency and changes.

One of the most effective ways for companies to maintain low cost is to detect and tightly control overall equipment performance (OEE). Therefore, in order to strengthen automation, the company must first install the trial program of GE Fanuc's Proficy Plant Applications efficiency module on the site of sugar cane receiving and pressing.

This module provides a comprehensive view of the key factors, including the downtime, number of devices, and the sequence in which events occur. When applied correctly, the module provides detailed, real-time reporting to support increased throughput with the same equipment, personnel and materials.

As a test, the trial runs first in a factory before deciding when and how to use the trial program in the other two factories. Because of the May-November production growth and progress in the process, the new system helped control problematic downtime, which increased overall production. Thus, based on those initial results, the trial program quickly expanded to three factories.

Due to the increase in the number of system configurations and the depth of application, the batch execution module of Proficy Plant Applications was added to the field of fermentation operations. The software helps manage the ISA S88-compliant formula to protect intellectual property. The S88 standard defines a common set of models and terminology that describes and defines a batch production system.

In addition to the Plant Applications module, the company also installed Proficy Portal and Proficy Historian, which includes 10,000 tags and 30 clients. The expanded system also includes Proficy HMI/SCADA Cimplicity, PACSystems controllers and 90-30 series PLCs, which are also part of the automation system. Proficy's open architecture also allows these products to interact with the company's existing ERP system, if needed.

The project has been completed in several phases by a team of people from system integrators STI Canada and STI do Brasil. The first phase was the replacement of some management reports and the quality and laboratory parameters of existing MES solutions, with the benefits of established downtime control and quality control.

Control system migration

Before the company used the trial software, the operating control platform was a self-developed solution that had been running for about 4 years. Management was disappointed that they were not able to provide the required data speed and effectiveness, so they decided to look for another MES system.

As company managers set out to bring together a list of business needs, some issues quickly emerged as extremely important factors that needed to be addressed. Everyone agrees that avoiding unplanned downtime is paramount. The plan is to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the monthly production, even a 30-minute shutdown shows a big difference. When the performance data is explored in more depth, it is clear that the milling plant is the area where the most downtime problems begin. Here the sugar cane is placed on the ground for extracting sugar cane juice. From there, the juice is used as a raw material for the production of finished sugar or ethanol.

How much to invest in each link depends on the demand for finished products on the market today. Price changes are usually not strong enough to drive changes in Nissan or weekly production. However, the product's scheduler can be configured twice or three times per quarter of production. Because companies can benefit from the two processes, they have a wider choice than those who only produce ethanol. The new control system helps support this flexibility, making the necessary changes easier and maximizing revenue.

Ethanol production can be very profitable. For large-scale commercial ethanol production, sugar products are now the most efficient and cost-effective ingredients. Brazil has become the world's largest producer of sugar cane. With increasing global demand, Brazilian producers have invested heavily in technological innovation to reduce production costs. In 1980, Brazil produced more than $2.50 per gallon of ethanol. Now, thanks to technological improvements, a gallon of output costs is only $0.75, and research into process improvement will find ways to lower costs.

But not only about the problem of ethanol, there is also the possibility of improvement in the production of sugar products. For example, different grades of sugar can be obtained from the same raw material, each with its own market price. The current practice is that when the production process is completed, all grades of sugar products in the same batch are mixed together, and then the price is determined based on the percentage of sugar of different qualities.

Engineers are working on the Plant Applications platform to control the production process in a way that separates the finished product into different bins according to different grades. This approach ultimately allows the scheduler to synthesize specific grades of sugar products based on market requirements.

Maintain quality

The most important part of this automation challenge is the lab part of the process. Now, most ethanol producers simply save the results of the experiment in a data sheet as part of a manual quality control program. Once the test program on the batch process is not performing well, the additional production time and cost consumed will need to be reprocessed.

But after applying the Proficy Plant application, the company connected the quality measurements to the production parameters. This increases the efficiency of the process and reduces duplication of effort.

As the world is trying to reduce its dependence on oil, renewable energy such as ethanol is becoming increasingly important. Business success will depend on maintaining efficiency and maintaining a competitive price level.