ABB’s automation systems selected by GE Healthcare

ABB has been awarded an order from GE Healthcare’s Life Science division in Uppsala, Sweden, worth approximately $4 million, for automation systems to be used in the production of protein separation media. The automation systems are part of the development of a new production plant to meet the increasing demand for separation media based on agarose and dextran.

The automation, using ABB’s IndustrialIT 800xA (extended Automation) system, provides control and monitoring of tanks and reactors, batch control plus control functions for automatic valves, stirrers and analogue measurement signals for the process. The systems also include functions for the assembling and handling process, operational data management with functions for reporting and archiving.

This project will also take advantage of the ABB PCEquipment Library, a generic, re-usable software suite for batch applications that breaks new ground by distributing the control intelligence throughout the control hierarchy, thus enabling truly generic, pre-tested and re-usable library objects to be provided for units, equipment modules and phases. This makes specification, implementation and configuration of control systems less complex and less time consuming. It enables, in many cases, process engineers to change recipes rather than require configuration engineer specialists for the task.