FOUNDATION fieldbus H1 Provided to a New Sugar Manufacturing Site from Shree Renuka Sugars Ltd., India [Reference]

Customer | Shree Renuka Sugars Ltd.

Project | Greenfield plant for sugar manufacturing 

Location | Gujarat, Western India

Completion | 2012

After experiencing a surprisingly fast solution with Advanced Diagnostics, Indian sugar manufacturer Shree Renuka Sugars was encouraged to equip its new plant with FOUNDATION fieldbus H1 and FieldConnex infrastructure components from Pepperl+Fuchs.

Shree Renuka Sugars Ltd. is one of the leading manufacturers of sugar, bioenergy, and fertilizers. One of its eight manufacturing sites is the Haldia sugar refinery in Debhog in the eastern part of India. The plant operates with a PROFIBUS PA infrastructure.

The very first contact between Shree Renuka Sugars and Pepperl+Fuchs was a call by Mr Haribabu, Senior Manager Instrumentation. Discussions ensued regarding the field instruments of two fieldbus segments in the Haldia refinery that did not show up in the process control system. Plant maintenance technicians had already spent two weeks troubleshooting without any results. The FieldConnex Advanced Diagnostic module quickly pointed to faulty cables as the cause of the problem. As soon as the cables were exchanged, all field devices within the segment showed up in the respective menus.

This prompted Mr. Haribabu to attend a special training at Pepperl+Fuchs on intrinsic safety, FOUNDATION Fieldbus H1, PROFIBUS PA, and FieldConnex, where he learned more about the special characteristics of FieldConnex components for fieldbus. Shortly after, he started a project for field instrumentation for a new plant in Gujarat in the western part of India, featuring FOUNDATION Fieldbus H1 and PROFIBUS.

For this plant, Pepperl+Fuchs was able to provide FieldConnex and AS-Interface modules, repeaters, power hubs, and power supplies. These components do not support easy implementation of the required intrinsic safety within explosion hazardous areas. They also feature intelligent solutions for easy maintenance.

Exchanging a specific module does not require any configuration, since the controller automatically assigns the correct address to the new device. The far reaching diagnostic capabilities of Advanced Diagnostics across the complete physical fieldbus layer are also very effective. For the Gujarat manufacturing site of Shree Renuka Sugar this opened the way to closely monitor the complete process control infrastructure and avoid time consuming troubleshooting. “Implementation and commissioning went so smooth”, was Haribabu's response when he compared this new approach to fieldbus communications with his previous project experiences.