Improving Quality, Efficiency, and Safety: Weather Monitoring for Industrial Chemical Plant

Penn Color, Hatfield, PA

Improving Quality, Efficiency and Safety: Weather Monitoring for Industrial Chemical Plant

In keeping with a reputation for cutting-edge technology and continuous innovation, a weather station has been installed at the Penn Color Hatfield, PA site. The location is HQ for the global company.

Established in 1964, Penn Color is a developer and manufacturer of color concentrates, additives, and pigment dispersions. Markets cover a range of industries including transportation, exterior building and construction, interior flooring and wall covering, cosmetics, and food and beverage packaging.

Their Pulsar 800™ Weather Station monitors lightning, precipitation, wind speed and direction, temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, and solar radiation.

“This station monitors and logs several weather‐related data points,” explains Control Engineer Dan Cole. “This data can be accessed by anyone with a computer on the Penn Color network. There is also a mobile app available to view the real‐time information from your phone or tablet.

The project involves three main objectives to improve quality, efficiency, and safety:

• – Correlate met data with production processes
• – Reactive control of HVAC systems
• – Health and safety notifications

Cole continues, “We are using the weather station for several things. A PLC is reading the weather data via modbus. That data is being logged by our server. We plan to correlate that data with some of our production process data points. For example, how does temperature and humidity affect some our production processes and finished goods quality.”

“Our HVAC units have multiple building management systems controlling them. We are going to use the temperature and humidity from the weather station as a single source for reactive control of the HVAC systems.”

Key factors for met data include:

• –  Lightning and wind data for stop work notifications for outdoor tasks such as roof activities and outdoor man lift usage
• – Rapid barometric pressure drop to watch for tornadoes
• – Wet bulb temperature for break vs work guidance during hot summer months
• – Rain rate to issue heavy rain warnings
• – Precipitation type for parking lot maintenance

Penn Color is implementing all this the functionality on the PLC side of their setup with an alarm notification system.

On a lighter note, Cole says, “The weather station is also a novelty for us. We have the cloud page cycling through the Appspace slide show that is displayed on our conference room TVs. Those of us who are weather fans have the app on our phones to check real time local weather data.”

“We plan to correlate that data with some of our production process data points. For example, how does temperature and humidity affect some our production processes and finished goods quality.”

Links for additional information:

Penn Color Website

Pulsar Weather Stations Page

Industrial Weather Stations

Weather Monitor App