RecyCoal recovers waste coal from active coal mines in a fast, efficient and environmentally positive way. The company says its “unique service” improves mine profitability by recovering and converting otherwise unused coal. In addition to this, the company targets land rehabilitation services which benefit local communities through long term environmental restoration projects, ranging from forestry and agriculture, to commercial developments. Its technology is based on the innovative RecyCoal Natural Medium Dual Density system, which facilitates the highly efficient recovery of waste coal that other systems have been unable to process. With over 30 years of experience, RecyCoal, while located in Doncaster, UK, also has a base in Brisbane, Australia and is currently working on a number of projects across the UK, the USA, Australia, Poland and South Africa.
Having embarked on an environmentally-led coal recovery and restoration scheme at the former Rossington Colliery in South Yorkshire, UK, RecyCoal has committed to cleaning up 13 Mt of colliery spoil. This also means yielding more than 950,000 t of coal for local electricity generation, in addition to restoring the land within five years. The Rossington site covers approximately 112.5 ha which once restored, will form a valuable and sizable part of local public open space with opportunities for nature conservation and public recreation.
Historically RecyCoal’s systems have been largely manually controlled. However the Rossington project is the first time the company has incorporated a complete automation and control system. With this and the scale of the project in mind, RecyCoal had specific criteria for the solutions provider to meet. Of paramount importance was a vendor with the capacity to deliver a complete turnkey solution. It needed to be highly modular and flexible with scope for scalability. As well as offering ease of engineering, the modularity was also important to reduce the volume of spares being held across multiple sites. In minimising downtime, high reliability and availability was also crucial, with hot-standby capabilities flagged as imperative. The chosen solution also needed to provide a high level of visibility for RecyCoal, with robust reporting capabilities on any aspect of process, production, maintenance and downtime, readily available. Given the complexity of the Rossington project, the capacity to present and disseminate such data to key management personnel on-demand was vital.
RecyCoal opted to appoint Schneider Electric to supply and support control, automation, distribution, IT and security equipment for the restoration project, delivered through a complete turnkey contract provided by the company’s PlantStruxure solution. At the automation level a system comprising Vijeo Citect redundant server SCADA and a Vijeo Historian database was selected. The SCADA servers run on Magelis iPCs, with APC Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) back-up. The main control system comprises a Modicon Quantum Hot-Standby pair, and an Ethernet backbone (via an array of Connexium Industrial Ethernet switches) connected down to associated plant equipment, including Modicon STB distributed IO, Preventa safety systems, Magelis HMI, Altivar Variable Speed Drives and a Okken Machine Control Centre. For superior reporting capabilities, Vijeo Historian provides fully automated data, both via on-screen visuals and paper records, according to user and department-specific requirements.
Bridging the divide between management and plant operations, Vijeo Historian’s intuitive interface and active data transfers, feed and integrate data from the control level up to the business systems. For RecyCoal this translates to valuable data being shared with a variety of personnel, in real-time or historically as well as being viewed locally or via remote connections; thus allowing staff immediate access to the information they need. As a result RecyCoal’s management team is able to make more informed and timely decisions, minimising costly production delays, whilst facilitating improved efficiencies across the entire site.
Operators can log all downtime events and via a series of drop-down selections, specify the nature of a stoppage whether its electrical, mechanical, or process based. Reports provide pinpoint accuracy on stoppage causes, greatly enhancing RecyCoal’s efficiency and drive towards continuous improvement. Valuable remote access to reports and real-time data is also available via a web browser interface. The modular nature of the both the hardware platforms and software applications allow RecyCoal a high degree of scalability and flexibility. For example, once a block of PLC code and associated SCADA graphic objects are tested and validated, the custom combination can be saved within a specific system library and reused in future projects, regardless of their scale. Thus as requirements evolve in future years, RecyCoal’s engineering design and testing timeframe can be significantly reduced as well as maintenance costs minimised.
To minimise inefficiencies caused by power quality issues, UK-based system integrator Roomfoss Control Systems has delivered specialist support and co-engineering on motor control centres for the coal recovery process in the wash plant and the filter press plant. Each control centre houses over 50 motor control cabinets along with Power Factor Correction to help ensure consistently high quality power is delivered. A combination of medium voltage (MV) switchgear and transformers are also being used at the Rossington site, courtesy of Schneider Electric’s local facility in Leeds, which is the headquarters and manufacturing base for MV switchgear and transformers.
