The Laizhou Gold Mine is a gold production facility in rural China and Itech Corporation’s client was a process designer, TST, acting on their behalf. Given that the site was in a rural location in China, the solution required that their control problem needed to be easy to use and easy to maintain.

The control strategy needed was complex and the challenge for Itech Corporation engineers was to provide the functionality required by the process but with a very easy to use human machine interface.

The client required a control system that would be capable of providing control, data acquisition and easy to use Human Machine Interface for their semi-automatic plant to be located on a gold mine in China.

The requirement was predominantly for analogue control and data acquisition of analogue data. Itech Corporation provided a control and data acquisition system designed around the Eurotherm Distributed Control System, DCS, integrated with a Mitsubishi Electric AnS series PLC for discrete control supervised by a Wonderware SCADA system.

Itech Corporation designed and constructed the control cabinet, designed and developed the application software for the DCS, PLC and the SCADA system and commissioned the system on-site in China.

The hybrid DCS solution was selected over purely PLC based solutions because of the functionality provided by the panel based loop controllers and the seamless integration with data acquisition system and the SCADA system. Function block programming was used extensively in the development of the control strategy.

The Eurotherm DCS and the Wonderware SCADA are products from the Invensys suite of industrial and process automation technology. Control cabinets were supplied by Rittal and electrical components were Schneider Electric.