ProgestAmbiente from MEU Italy uses MAPS successfully to visualize small Biogas plants..

Collaboration between ProgestAmbiente and Mitsubishi Electric – an architecture for process control and supervision for the transformation of waste materials into energy

The “material” mentioned by Giuseppe Imma is the sewage Roana’scattle produce about 60m³  per day, fed into the anaerobic digester of the new cogeneration plant. The plant is active 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

“ProgestAmbiente, a MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC (Italy) system integrator, with its technical and engineering expertise, has been able to build the infrastructure that you see today, selecting state-of-the-art automation technologies, like those of Mitsubishi Electric, and ensuring the fundamental requirements at Roana: simplicity and immediacy of process management”, explains Carmen Imma.

INVERTER, PLC AND SCADA IN FIELD

The digester is a short distance from the control room where the Mitsubishi Electric control system is located. “For the control and supervision of the Roana plant we have chosen technologies for motion, logical control and supervision from Mitsubishi Electric, not just for technological reliability that characterizes them, but also because they allowed us to confer that simplicity and that immediacy in management of the process that immediately took place was achieved”, says Cerrone.

The Mitsubishi control system consisted of a Q-Series PLC, communicating to the VFDs in the field with the CC-Link IE Field module. The FR-F840 inverters with integrated Ethernet control the pump motors, digester mixer, hot water pumps and separator.

“We program the inverters remotely”, Cerrone tells us.

The Mitsubishi Electric MAPS Server, with 150 scan points, was selected by ProgestAmbiente for monitoring and the control of the whole Roana plant.

COGENERATION: PRESENT AND FUTURE

Today the plant installed at Roana has a total power capacity of 2,400 kWh per day, which is fed directly into the Enel electricity network. (estimated value of around 15 thousand euros per month.)

This project is managed in full compliance with the primary goals set by Carmen and Giuseppe Imma: creating an infrastructure that was as easy as possible to manage.

“The solution proposed by ProgestAmbiente and Mitsubishi Electric allows us to efficiently monitor daily production energy, with a constant monitoring of the sensors and a precise automatic regulation slurry flow rate in input, and maintaining a constant ideal temperature inside the digester,” says Carmen Imma.

The next goal is to integrate the management of the motors with the MAPS system. “The significance of the MAPS system has been its extreme openness, which leaves us free to choose from its many native functions, but also to add functionality, developed by us on request from Roana.

Why automation technology in a livestock company?
Carmen Imma: “Because I thought about the future and I wanted to choose an open technology, ensuring maximum simplicity: so our plant can operate automatically, I just have to worry about evaluating the daily condition of the sewage at the intake”.

The Imma family thinks of the future: “the new cogeneration plant from biogas, set up in just four months, made it possible to solve the problem of sewage disposal, transforming it from scrap to new value source and energy, thanks to automation.”