A chemical plant mainly consists of a set of equipment that carry out chemical and physical transformations of raw materials to obtain the desired end product. It is easy to realize how complex it is to control and coordinate what happens in every section of the plant so that the resulting product complies with the necessary specifications and operating costs are acceptable.
Actually, this corresponds to keep a lot of process variables, such as temperature, pressure, pH, etc…, on prefixed values. Consequently it can be stated that very complex processes could be developed only thanks to automatic control; this was unthinkable before.
The units and equipment described in this catalogue have been designed and produced to enable an exhaustive understanding of the mechanisms of automatic process control, and an actual testing on industrial control instruments.
All products have been designed and manufactured according to some essential principles:
- faithful reproduction of the design used in industry, although on reduced scale;
- use of industrial instruments (sensors, transducers, actuators) of the best trademarks available on the market (ABB, Schneider Electric, E&H, ecc.);;
- particular care to the quality of materials to ensure long lifetime and industrial standard with a large use of stainless steel (frameworks, tanks, pipes and valves) and of borosilicate glass (tanks and columns);
- application of the most advanced technologies for system control and supervision;
- wide choice of sizes and of control type (PID control, PLC, free signals).
The equipment and units described in this catalogue have been divided into four categories:
- Instrumentation
- Plants
- Units
- Bench top units
The category of “Instrumentation” includes units designed to help students become familiar with and understand the operation of the equipment normally used for process measurements (flow, level, etc.).
The category of “Plants” includes the equipment of bigger size enabling to control 2 process variable at the same time; mod. UNIPRO/EV enables to control four variables.
The category of “Units” includes the equipment of intermediate size enabling to control 1, 2, 3 or 4 process variables according to models.
The category of “Bench top units” includes smaller equipment that can be placed on a table. These units are of rather low cost, but they use instruments of the same level as that of the equipment of the other two categories.
Most “Units” and “Bench top Units” will be available in the following versions:
- standard version, with board-type PID controller;
- special version with board-type PLC; model’s name is the same of standard version’s, but with subscript “p” (e.g.: FCp/EV);
- special version with free signals; model’s name is the same of standard version’s, but with subscript “x” (e.g.: FCx/EV).
The version with “free signals” does not include any controller or PLC, but it is equipped with an interface with input and output signals that can be connected with a PID controller (included in the equipment) or with an external PLC.
