Valspar Corporation is the sixth largest coatings company in the world, with $3.180 billion in sales in 2008. For all plant design, integration, measurement and control, Valspar trusts Meter Maintenance & Controls Inc. (MMCI).
MMCI is a system integrator and technology supplier in Redlands, CA, that specializes in true turnkey liquid measurement solutions. They have set up or retrofitted the Valspar plants in Wheeling, IL, Sacramento, CA, Lebanon, PA, Statesville, NC, and Garland, TX, to name a few. New plants receive a top-to-bottom paint blending and batching system, with everything from the piping, to the electrical, to the process equipment and programming being supplied, installed and programmed by MMCI.
To handle the paint blending process in each of these plants, MMCI recommends Emerson Process Micro Motion flow meters. These flow meters measure mass flow, volume flow, density and temperature variables, and provide precise control measurement of the various ingredients that are blended together to create a given batch of paint.
From a management and operation standpoint, Valspar wanted a system that would allow the entire enterprise to be integrated from the plant floor controls to the information systems. Plant operators need diagnostic information for monitoring the process and for identifying maintenance needs or problems on the line without requiring that the operator be trained on the control system. The laboratory also needed access to this information for quality control and trending.
As a loyal Rockwell Automation® customer, MMCI chose to use a Rockwell Automation Process Automation System (PAS) to extract data from the flow meters. As each flow meter batches a raw material into a mixing tank, the process variables are recorded by RSSql™ and ultimately present to the Valspar operators in a Rockwell Automation RSView® Human Machine Interface (HMI). In RSView an alarm system is implemented with predetermined setpoints that, when triggered, alert the operator and provide cues indicating the proper action can be taken. These process variables are also pulled into RSSql to give Valspar’s laboratory access to historical data for all past batches.