Customer Reference

Eramet Le Havre-Sandouville Refinery, Le Havre, France

Context: Eramet is a rapidly growing French mining and metallurgical group that employs more than 15,000 people. Eramet Le Havre-Sandouville refinery combines upstream integration and an advanced hydrometallurgical process to offer high purity products such as nickel hydroxycarbonate, nickel chloride hexahydrate and high purity nickel metal. The management system for the production of all nickel products is highly critical and its quality is certified against the standards ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. Eramet decided to migrate some of the PLCs that control the production from old April PB 400 to Rockwell Automation PLC-5.

Challenge: The main challenge of the migration was that Eramet wanted to merge, for the first miration, 2 April PB 400 into 1 Rockwell PLC-5 and, for the second migration, 3 April PB 400 into 1 Rockwell PLC-5. Of course, the quality of the code had to be flawless. Eramet also asked for a guarantee of a good restart. Indeed, each day of production at Eramet Le Havre-Sandouville refinery is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thus, the downtime had to be as short as possible.

Success: Itris Automation Square successfully delivered both migrations, meeting the high quality level requested by Eramet and experiencing a very smooth commissioning. There was no issue when the system re-started and Eramet hydrometallurgical process is now well under control of new PLCs.