- About the customer
Terminal 6 www.terminal6.com.ar is the number one agricultural terminal facility in volume in Argentina. Its logistical and manufacturing operation allows it to ship grains and products such as biodiesel, oils, and glycerin around the world. Terminal 6 processes an average of 1300 semi-trucks, 550 railway wagons, and 9 cargo ships totaling 90,000 Tons per day. It has 4 docks, 15 vertical and 15 horizontal silos with e total of 1.8 billion Tons of storage capacity. Terminal 6 is located facing the Parana River, with an area of 1224 acres.
- The challenge
For this use case, the focus was put on “grain contamination”; Silo cells store different commodities, and their placement is recorded in the operational system, but the position and content of each cell are manually checked by the operator. Terminal 6 horizontal silos have a 220,500 US Ton capacity with dimensions of 500 Ft x 150 Ft x 120 Ft. Also, the silo’s tripper loader is manually operated creating a great risk of contamination if the operator misinterprets the system of records. One contaminated cell has the potential to create a 2.2 million in operation loss.
- Environmental conditions
As you can see in the illustration, the silo dimensions and the harsh conditions made this needed operational control very challenging with traditional PLC/SCADA/Historian control units because of the complicated wiring and placement. The inside of the silo will have extreme temperatures, dust, and vibration.
- The solution
As the silo’s tripper was manually operated and no sensors were connected, the operator was only able to have visual feedback on a very dusty and large area. The lack of electronic feedback from the tripper was the key issue to solve. The expected solution was an IOT device that collects positional data and feeds it back to the system of records to verify the tripper’s correct position and avoid grain contamination. Terminal 6 found a solution with Edge Hub that does not require many steps to produce data and collects many environmental conditions like temperature, light, sound, vibration, humidity, gas, and pressure, out of the box. Edge hub for IOT allows an easy integration with other technologies and interfaces saving time and effort compared with traditional IOT implementations. Also, what really separates Splunk Edge Hub is the ability to collect and share data with internal and external standard ports, support extreme environmental conditions, and connect wirelessly.
After field testing, Terminal 6 adopted a tripper positional external RFID sensor that is resilient to the silo’s environment. The solution gave not only the expected control to avoid losses but also a value-added tool to measure the internal environment of the silo to prevent fires and practice preventive maintenance.
