Schneider Electric UK has been selected to automate a coal from waste recovery scheme using the unique RecyCoal Natural Medium Dual Density system.  The process involves the fast efficient recovery of waste coal from the abandoned mine spoil heaps and delivering it to clients or direct to the power generation market.

The site covers approximately 112.5ha at the former Rossington Colliery in South Yorkshire UK.  The project involves processing 13 million tonnes of colliery spoil to yield an estimated 950,000 tonnes of coal for local electricity generation, in addition to restoring the land within for amenity use within five years.

Prior to the agreement, the RecyCoal systems was largely manually controlled, with the Rossington project is the first to incorporate a complete automation and control system.  The system comprising Vijeo Citect redundant server SCADA and a Vijeo Historian database was selected. The SCADA servers run on Magelis iPCs.

The main control system comprises a Modicon Quantum Hot-Standby pair, and an Ethernet backbone connected to associated plant equipment, including Modicon STB distributed IO, Preventa safety systems, Magelis HMI, and Altivar Variable Speed Drives.

System Scalability and Flexibility

The modular hardware platform and software applications can be reused, allowing RecyCoal significant reduction in future design costs.  For example once a block of PLC code and associated SCADA graphic objects are tested and validated, the custom combination can be saved in a system library and re-used in other projects, regardless of their scale.

Improved Operational and Energy Efficiencies

RecyCoal also benefit from a sophisticated level of information management across the project, with Vijeo Historian’s superior data visibility and reporting capabilities, storing and reporting on-demand, on any aspect of their process. Vijeo Historian comes complete with a suite of pre-configured reports from basic tag recognition and alarm rationalisation to energy management reports; combining with the inbuilt Process Analyst, allowing RecyCoal to optimise operational efficiencies as well as simplifying the vast volumes of process data across the site.

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