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Data Logging from Pilot Plant

Until recently, a Hercules pilot plant for the manufacture of water treatment chemicals used an old DOS program to control its data loggers. The plant's Program Manager wanted to upgrade the software but feared he would have to write the program himself, as he could not find a flexible product that would accept custom-made drivers. Then he discovered Windmill software.

"The Windmill software was a great find for me. The free download was used to evaluate application of the software to my datacq hardware. I then purchased a license for three installations."
Jeff Castor, Program Manager, Hercules

Most of the water treatment chemicals manufactured by the plant are polymers, made by typical batch polymerisation processes (solution, emulsion and dispersion polymerisations). The plant consists of six reaction systems. It employs seven Molytek 2702 loggers, connected via an RS232 link to a PC by means of a code activated switch. The Windmill software suite could easily read and control the Molytek loggers through its serial driver. The suite also included a software Logger application to store and time-stamp many channels of different types of data. Process data logged from the plant by Windmill include: reactor temperature, reactor jacket temperatures (supply and return), reactor jacket flowrate, reactor pressure, overhead temperatures (vapour, distillate, condenser coolant) and various weights, reagent flows and process analytical instrument readings.

Readings taken by Windmill are passed to various data processing tools for analysis and reporting, including Excel, RS/1 and TK!Solver.

The Molytek 2702 was a state of the art logger in the 1980s. It is built of standard mechanical and electronic components and so, can, in theory, be maintained indefinitely. For that reason a lot of 2702s are still around. They make a good, reliable, hardware front end to a low speed data acquisition system.

If you would like to evaluate Windmill software please download our free comDebug program. This lets you confirm that Windmill can read and control your serial (RS232, RS485 or Modbus) instrument. When you are satisfied that Windmill will do the job, you can purchase the Windmill suite of software with the COMIML serial driver, from our on-line catalogue for just £145. To try out the Windmill suite of Logging, Charting and Control applications, download the Windmill demo.

Windmill Settings for the Molytek

If you want to talk to a Molytek through a code switch, in addition to adding the code switch commands ahead of each channel prompt string, you may find it necessary to adjust the "timeout" and "instrument idle time" values in ConfIML setup. This adjustment will have to be arrived at by trial and error. Other settings are as follows, although you may need to alter them depending on how you are using your Molytek loggers.

Initialisation String: ***

Timeout: 5000 ms

Data persistence time: 1000 ms

Instrument idle time: 100 ms

Read mode: Read Directly (Request/Response on Demand)

Prompt String: SVAA

Parse String: \I","\I03\E"\C013"\I20