The Delegate of Agriculture of the Junta de Andalucía, María José Martín, and the Delegate of the Environment, Manuel Francisco García, have visited the Conde de Benalúa facilities.
The CEO of ANSOTEC, Alberto Guzmán, was able to explain and present the successful case of implementation of the Connected Oil Mill Solution 4.0. This solution has been developed and implemented by ANSOTEC in the San Sebastián cooperative in Benalúa de las Villas.
Connected Oil Mill 4.0
In the town of Benalúa de las Villas, the facilities of the San Sebastián – Conde de Benalúa cooperative are located, a company founded in 1954. It currently has about 1,500 members and produces and markets olive oil, with brands such as Amarga and Pica, Count of Benalúa and Olivar del Sur.
The volume produced by this company is possible thanks to the oil mill that the company has, which is divided into three areas: a reception area, where the farmers take the olives, they are cleaned and they are introduced into hoppers; an extraction area, in which the olives are turned into oil; and a warehouse, where the final product is stored until it is delivered to the cooperative members.
Ansotec is specialized in the implementation of digital transformation solutions for the industry, including all types of automation and control processes, mainly for the food, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors.
Study and implementation
Ansotec’s first decision for this project, according to Guzmán, was “to start a digitization study of the plant that contemplated the execution of the project in two phases.” For this, Ansotec proposed to Conde de Benalúa to support this entire process on the equipment, systems and automation technology of Rockwell Automation, of whom they are certified integrators.
Thus, in a first phase, they started the automation of the extraction room, where the olives are converted into oil. There, the ThinManager visualization platform and the PlantPAx Distributed Control System (DCS) were implemented to properly manage the core of the plant process.
In a second phase, the entire ThinManager platform was extended to the rest of the plant, as well as the PlantPAx system was implemented in the rest of the plant areas (the area of the olives’ reception yards and the winery). At the same time, the production management solution created by Ansotec and called “Almazara Conectada 4.0” was implemented to control all the processes and management of the plant.
This “Connected Mill 4.0” allows “the integration of all the data” comments Guzmán. “With this tool we can implement all the devices and equipment that we want based on standards from recognized manufacturers such as Rockwell Automation. This is how we capture and store all the information, which can be displayed and visualized in various ways to be analyzed later ”.
