PROJECTS

Company

AIM, a global leader in the metal recycling industry, has several plants worldwide and mandated Lem technologies to standardize the control and centralize the data acquisition of its atomizers. They are used to create a fine metallic powder with metal ingots and are critical to AIM operations. The atomizers were causing significant problems:  

• Unstable product quality in the absence of efficient control
• Excessive nitrogen consumption due to poor process control
• Broken components due to incorrect manual operations
• Troubleshooting difficult in the absence of detailed alarms and electrical plans
• No production track record to ensure monitoring and quality improvement

Mandate

To solve these issues, Lem Technologies carried out an electrical inspection of existing equipment to keep the major components and make a new control panel for every atomizer. We added a local screen to assist the operator in his work, and a centralized SCADA to gather all the information about the atomizers. Together with AIM’s engineering, production and maintenance teams, Lem produced a functional description to describe how every atomizer should operate:

• List of data on every atomizer archived in the SCADA to have a centralized history around the world
• Start-up conditions monitored by an atomizer’s PLC before allowing production launch
• Automatic preparation sequence to achieve start-up conditions and avoid damage caused by operator actions 
• Production start-up and shut-off sequence to ensure product quality
• Management of recipes to standardize production parameters
• Alarm management to simplify troubleshooting and prevent equipment breakage

Benefits

Thanks to this project, AIM can now produce efficiently, save on nitrogen consumption and quickly troubleshoot every atomizer with the help of electrical plans and alarms that indicate the source of the problems. AIM was also able to improve product quality thanks to a centralized history that allows production analysis and comparison in order to improve production recipes.