Programmable Logic Controllers

As the demand for food is increasing worldwide, fertilizers are playing an essential role in improving agricultural productivity. OCI Nitrogen (hereinafter OCI) is a leading producer of mineral fertilizers and the world's largest producer of melamine, which is used to make adhesives and resins for a wide range of applications, such as furniture panels, laminate flooring, coatings, paints, and plastics.

• To bring the customer a real-time monitoring and management capability, Yokogawa installed STARDOM (FCJ), flow meters, and transmitters at key points throughout the distribution network.
• The STARDOM FCJ controllers achieved an accurate water loss management system while keeping the running costs to a minimum.

The reverse osmosis (RO) membrane is in use today as a main component of water filtering equipment, because it has a fairly high performance record in removing various impurities such as salt from water. Especially in isolated islands and desert regions where there is no other choice but to utilize seawater as the only water resource, the RO membrane is an indispensable component of the RO module for water purification systems.

The process industry in Japan faces increasingly critical environmental and safety issues. Additionally, in Japan, many skilled engineers with years of experience will be retiring in 2007. Although the process industries such as petroleum, petrochemical, steel and paper, etc., are highly automated, human skill is still required in an abnormal situation or for a critical production change.

The engineering phase holds the largest ratios in control system configuration in terms of both time and money, so improving engineering efficiency is one of the biggest issues when it comes to system integration. In the STARDOM, Application Portfolios (APPF) are devised to dramatically slash engineering costs and increase software reliability.

As the world's societies become more connected, market competition is becoming more ruthless and transactions are performed at ever increasing speeds. Deregulation has ignited global competition throughout the world. The proliferation of Information and Internet technologies have accelerated the growth of global competition, with life cycles for high tech products having lives measured in "dog years" (in each normal year they advance seven years).

In recent years, energy demand is tending to increase year by year due to economic growth in emerging countries. To help protect the global environment, renewable energy sources such as wind power, solar power and geothermal heat are attracting attention as alternative power sources to fossil fuel.

With the recent rapid advancement of technology, user equipment has become more and more complicated, diversified and faster. This has been imposing an increase in engineering costs and increasingly many users require devices facilitating customization and the reuse of past resources (legacies).