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Macawber Beekay chooses GE Fanuc controllers and HMI for Indian material handling facilities

05/12/2008

Charlottesville, Va. -- GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, announced that it has received a order from Macawber Beekay of New Delhi, India for a hardware and software material handling solution that provides environmental pollution control and energy conservation. The $1MM order includes a complete hardware and software solution delivering centralized digitized data and multi-platform control.

Macawber Beekay’s unique Dense Phase Pneumatic Conveying systems address the region’s need for environmental controls by offering solutions to the bulk material handling problems of core sectors of the Indian industry, i.e., power, cement, steel and chemicals. In the past few years, the company has been steadily increasing its share in the material handling market.

“Macawber Beekay has been working closely with GE Fanuc for five years,” said Vish Palekar, general manager GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms – India and GE Enterprise Solutions – India. “All of our work together has paid off with this substantial solution purchase.”

The two companies have worked together on various projects with NTPC, BHEL, Indian state electricity boards and private power companies including Reliance, Jindals and Vedanta.

This new solution automates ash handling plants for various state electricity generating boards and private companies. The applications required complete PLC-based control panels based on GE Fanuc’s Series 90-30 and PACSystems RX3i controller systems, Proficy HMI/SCADA – CIMPLICITY, with VersaMax I/O operator and engineering workstations. Complete ash handling systems are controlled by operator workstations using CIMPLICITY in auto mode, while backup control provision is also possible from mimic-based control desk. Typically, ash collected from various hoppers is conveyed to an intermediate fly ash silo through dense pneumatic conveying systems.

The company was eager to get these projects in production because India’s energy sector is booming with a proposed addition of 78,000 MW in the next five years. This represents almost 60 percent of the current installed capacity in the country. The demand has been created due to huge infrastructure development in the past few years with most of the capacity being added in coal-based thermal power plants. Many of the local power plant equipment manufacturers are contributing to this growth.