AD Plant Solutions

Anaerobic Digester Biogas Plants

A typical plant uses food waste, energy crops, crop residues, and of course animal slurries and manure to produce methane which is used to fuel a CHP which produces hot water, and from 250 to 1000 kW of Electricity which can be exported to the grid.

The complete package of this comes from trusted expertise from a local base employing local skills and professional experience. This technology was originally developed and proven in Europe and now delivered as a truly local product.

As part of this package Ashdale where chosen as the main supplier and systems integrator for the control and Instrumentation solutions.

Mitsubishi PLCs

Ashdale chose Mitsubishi’s System Q Universal PLC for this application’s control.

System Q is modular and therefore is easily sized to different sizes of plant.

Because of the large quantities of materials involved it was important to have high resolution analogue inputs and the System Q Real floating-point calculation made for very accurate calculations.

From our Belfast offices in Northern Ireland, Ashdale is proud to sell and support Mitsubishi Electric PLCs and be their premier partner in NI for Programmable Controllers.

Mitsubishi Variable Speed Drives

For small kW applications like Gas Booster pumps the FR-D700 inverter drive was used

The FR-D700 is especially advantageous for standard applications by virtue of its user- friendliness. It stores the last 8 alarms along with the frequency and voltage at which the alarm occurs which is useful information for fault finding.

The main transfer pump is a positive displacement pump and it is controlled by a full flux vector FR-A700 drive. This gives excellent torque at low speeds and allows torque to be monitored so that blockages can be detected and the pump protected.

From our Belfast offices in Northern Ireland, Ashdale is proud to sell and support Mitsubishi Electric VSDs and be their premier partner in NI for Variable Speed Drives.

Mitsubishi HMIs

HMI’s

A touch screen HMI which as well as visualisation of the process, logs and trends all the critical parameters and stores a record of alarms.

It has the ability to store process settings as a recipe. This allows different recipe setting to be stored for changing feed parameters.

It has serial, USB and Ethernet connections as well at an internal and external CF memory slot.

The Ethernet is connected to the farm network and to the internet so can be viewed and controlled from any computer on the farm or from anywhere in the world via the internet

From our Belfast offices in Northern Ireland, Ashdale is proud to sell and support Mitsubishi Electric HMIs and be their premier partner in NI for Human Machine Interface solutions

Endress+Hauser Flow Meters

Endress+Hauser Instrumentation

Endress+Hauser Instrumentation was used on the AD plant to monitor flow, pressure, level and temperature of both gas and slurry.

The Promag was chosen as the main slurry measuring devices to offer cost-effective flow measurement with a high degree of accuracy for a wide range of process conditions.

The tried-and-tested Promag sensors offer no pressure loss, is not sensitive to vibrations and is simple to install and commission.

From our Belfast offices in Northern Ireland, Ashdale is proud to sell and support Endress & Hauser Instrumentation and be their premier partner in NI for flow meter solutions

Pepper+Fuchs Isolation Barriers

Pepper+Fuchs Isolation Barriers

As the gas areas around the AD plant are Ex Zoned both analogue and digital barriers are used.

Intrinsic safety barriers are the core of Pepperl+Fuchs' product portfolio. They offer the widest selection of products for protection of electrical signals located in hazardous areas. These intrinsic safety modules combine the energy limiting features of a zener barrier with galvanic isolation. Pepperl+Fuchs offers systems for different applications and mountings.

As some of the Instrumentation is programmed and setup using Hart Communication, Hart transparent barriers are used so that setup can be done in the safe area.

From our Belfast offices in Northern Ireland, Ashdale is proud to sell and support Pepperl+Fuchs and be their premier partner in NI.