Whether it be crud treatment, PLS clarification or other duties, centrifuges from GEA Westfalia Separator are in wide use in base metals recovery. Now the company has launched a new control generation, the simple, efficient, reliable and remote-enabled: GEA Westfalia Separator IO. GEA Westfalia Separator says this “reduces complexity and focuses on user-friendliness. The focus was on what the user needs, either the operator, the commissioner or the company’s own service engineer. Who needs what information and functionalities in which situation and what is not required, or in short: userfriendliness.
“For the customer, this has enormous benefits: operating personnel are quickly able to understand and handle the control units of the centrifuge, the familiarisation is relatively short. This increases flexibility in production. The reliability of the production processes also improves because, if the system only displays what the user needs, the error potential declines automatically. The equation is simple: the fewer the buttons, the lower the probability to hit the wrong one. However, this does not mean that the new generation of control units has less functionality. On the contrary, IO offers much more than today`s control units. It is the user guidance facility which has been consistently reduced to the essentials to make sure that the user is not consistently overloaded with useless options or information. The benefit for the customer is that the wide range of functionalities is now available in a much more intuitive manner.”
The displays have been streamlined, the symbols are self-explanatory, and the colour code is based on international standards, either traffic signal colours for statuses or the standard which is used in plant construction for identifying pipework. One glance, and the operator knows not only what is running through the centrifuge but also whether the conditions are good or bad in this particular situation. IO is able not only to control and display, it is also able to evaluate.
The user can see how efficiently the centrifuge is running in relation to energy consumption, performance or separation efficiency. What settings have to be changed now, and how? IO also provides user assistance in regard to this question, by way of the optional efficiency programs. The only thing left to do now for the operator is to decide what his optimum status of the centrifuge is: maximum separating efficiency or performance, minimum energy consumption or auxiliary materials?
The user only needs to push a button, and the centrifuge automatically adjusts to the desired status.
IO also features remote capability. Operators can access centrifuges via a tablet or smartphone. Even remote diagnosis by GEA Westfalia Separator experts is possible.
