Unipetrol is a major refinery and petrochemical company in the Czech Republic. One of the company’s biggest assets is the industrial premises Chempark Záluží which is the largest chemical production facility in the country.The facility is currently the seat of several dozens of important chemical and service companies and is a daily workplace for 6,500 employees from 180 companies.
The part of the plant where Ethylene is produced is particularly important since it is widely used as a component in many other products produced at the plant. A stoppage in the Ethylene production would have enormous economic implications because it would affect the overall production. A complete new network backbone for power control and distribution as well as an upgraded network backbone for the emergency shutdown system has been built with DUPO to support the applications in the Ethylene unit.
The communication infrastructure and the systems has been built and implemented by Inelsev, a Czech company that provides services for industrial automation and energetic systems. The decision to use DUPO devices was based on a strong working relationship between Inelsev and DUPO’s Czech distributor.
This is a plant where reliability is absolutely crucial. The systems are designed to be extremely robust in order to guarantee continuous operation and to protect the plant and the people who work here. In the previous network solution we used another switch brand that we had to replace. The main reason for that was the network ring recovery time. Whenever the network had to recover, it took so long that connected equipment (OPC servers) would not start up and connect properly. powered DUPO product including the ring network protocol DPRING with 5 ms recovery time was a perfect fit. Extremely fast, robust and easy to use,” said Pavel Ješina, R&D manager at Inelsev who have designed and implemented both networks.
The two networks were built in 2010. The emergency shutdown system was an upgrade project where old switches from another brand were replaced with DUPO’s in a dual ring network topology. The purpose of this network is to shut down the plant in an emergency situation. The power control and distribution network was built as a completely new system and connects 30 substations throughout the plant with a central control room. The network consists of 270 communication devices, over 500 process screens and panels, 13 000 I/O connections and more than 300 000 alarms. The network consists mainly of DPCOM6000-BD02000008 and a variety of DPCOM industrial switches.
The many combinations of ports and the possibility to mix copper and fibre media was another big driver for selecting DUPO products. “Inside a building we can use regular copper Ethernet cables, but the cables connecting the different buildings must be fibre due to safety legislations,” explained Pavel. “The many models and port combinations in the DPCOM Industrial range allowed us to select the ideal product at every location and to prepare for expanding the network in the future".
Another positive outcome from using DUPO devices is that configuration and maintenance is extremely simple. All managed DUPO devices are powered by the same operating system. This means that you will get an identical experience whether you configure a DPCOM or any other managed DUPO device, regardless of model. It also means that any new functionality added to any new version will be backwards compatible and available in any previously installed device. The operating system is designed to be as robust as the hardware. It is made to be simple to use and configure and thoroughly tested in the DUPO software test lab. “I have worked with many different brands of switches and routers, and compared to many others, configuring a DUPO switch is like kindergarten,” said Pavel.