CASE STUDY

Evonik Uses Modular Process Control for Greater Customizability

Siemens’ Simatic PCS Neo process control system is helping chemical manufacturer Evonik make its production model more fl exible.

By David Miller

In recent times, process industries such as chemical manufacturing are facing many of the same challenges as those in the discrete manufacturing space. Increasingly stringent competitive pressures require them to be ever-more fl exible, even with the cost of feedstocks, energy, and labor potentially rising. For instance, pharmaceutical manufacturers using specialty chemical inputs are tasked with achieving faster time-to-market for smaller batches of more customized products, as personalized medicine and self-administration of treatment become more common.

For many companies, including specialty chemical provider Evonik, modular production may provide a solution to these challenges. Modularization of process automation systems entails the replacement of large-scale plant infrastructure oriented toward producing a single product with a series of distributed or modularized production cells capable of producing multiple customized products.

Recently, Evonik adopted automation technology supplier Siemens’ web-based Simatic PCS Neo process control system to aid in its shift to a more modular production environment. The Simatic

PCS Neo allows multiple users across the globe to collaborate on projects simultaneously by granting them visibility and insight into plant sections at various locations. Following from this, the commissioning of projects has been made more e cient, as production can be more intelligently allocated across an array of available assets.

“Generally speaking, we’re seeing a clear trend in the market toward shorter innovation cycles and more specifi c adaptations of product portfolios. This also applies to our plant. That’s why we wanted to implement a plant concept that would allow us to quickly and easily prepare and expand plant sections for a new test,” said Stefan Handel, project manager at Evonik.

Simatic PCS Neo’s process historian also enables centralized archiving of all process data so that daily reports for plant sections and plants as a whole can be generated automatically. Moreover, new plant sections can be connected to the historian via plug-andplay functionality with few mechanical modifi cations.

According to Handel, Module Type Package (MTP) protocols were required for integrating Evonik’s plant assets into the Simatic PCS Neo. These protocols provide standardized defi nitions of all information assets required to communicate to higher-level systems, increasing interoperability and allowing individual process modules to be added and removed without excessive reconfi guration.

“MTP enables us to structure sections in the plant as modules with their own intelligence,” Handel said. “The intelligent modules are combined in and managed, monitored, and controlled in the central control system, which allows us to confi gure our processes even more fl exibly.”

Evonik’s fi rst modular plant section began production on schedule in February 2020, just three months after the project was launched. Since that time, several other Evonik plants have been successfully converted as well.

Learn more about Siemens’ Simatic PCS Neo.