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[Music]
Hi. Kelly from Opto 22 here. I'm not in the office today, because today I'm in Foothill Ranch,
California, here at the headquarters of Lumenyte International Corporation. Lumenyte
has been producing fiber-optic lighting for over 26 years now, and they have a very interesting
process control application, which they've offered to show us. Let's go check it out.
>>Kelly: I'm now sitting down with Scott Dill from Lumenyte. Mr. Dill, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
>>Scott: Sure. I've been with the company since the start, in production and operations management.
I'm currently the facilities and production operations manager.
>>Kelly: Can you kind of explain to us what Lumenyte does? >>Scott: We manufacture fiber-optics and put together
lighting systems. We manufacture illumination sources. We're moving into LED illumination
sources. Recently we've had a lot of new business stemming from the Homeland Security and the
military aspects of things, providing security solutions that are designed to help with
inspections, primarily for explosives and things of that like. The potential for green
lighting, or environmentally-sound lighting and energy-conservation lighting in conjunction
with solar light sources: that's a potential frontier. It's your imagination that's really
the limitation for the applications and the uses of the fiber-optics and combination of light sources.
>>Kelly: So, when you guys are making your fiber-optics,
what's one of the largest challenges that you have to overcome in the process?
>>Scott: Maintaining very strict consistency and very very tight tolerances and specifications.
The environmental conditions need to be very tight in order to have a consistent result
in turning out this product. We bring together different aspects. Um, we have polymerization,
casting, we have to bring the chemicals together, we have the chemical processes and purifications.
We have to have a nice tight control process, because it's very difficult to control the
polymerization of a product over a long length like that.
>>Kelly: So, I realize Lumenyte's process is proprietary, but do you mind showing us some of
your control equipment in action? >>Scott: Sure.
>>Scott: Hi. We're out in the production area now, adjacent to the casting chamber. I wanted
to introduce Paul Robbins at this time. He's our VP of Operations and he helps oversee
all of the operations in general. What you are just looking at is the main casting chamber.
All of the thermal sensors and valves that allow us to control the hot and cold attributes
of this process reside up and down the length of this chamber. And all of the equipment
hooks into the equipment pad over here, the tanks and what we call the ARS or air refrigeration
system. And all of this stuff that's on the chamber and the pad is all wired back into
the control panel, and this is where the Opto 22 control equipment and hardware resides
and is controlled from there. All right, we're coming into the control room,
our little room that we do all of the set-up and start-up and shut-down and monitoring from.
The computers are in here and HMIs are available for us in here. This is our main
monitoring page. It shows us most of the attributes and the process, and it enables us to monitor
almost all of the different aspects of the process and make sure they keep going right,
the pumps are moving at the right speeds, that the sensors are activating when they
are supposed to activate, and reading all the proper temperatures. And we can go onto
a couple of other screens such as this one which helps us monitor in more detail things
like the cooling system. And back to the reactor we've also got a series of input pages for
the operators where they start the system, inputting the different information parameters
for each particular production run. >>Randy: When I first became involved with
the project was to provide backup to our engineering and production staff in the
event that we had issues that needed to be dealt with. As the Director of IT for this company,
I am pretty much involved with anything that has an engineering process or computer
application or software that's installed to provide services for the project to be completed.
Our fear was that if we went in and we started making changes without having proper education
as our background, we would upset our system. This system being the lifeblood of our organization
we could not afford to do that. So that being the case, we went to the Opto 22 training
and received a great welcome from the Opto 22 staff, and phenomenal training. The hospitality
was tremendous, as well as the professionalism of the trainers, the entire staff that we
dealt with. So the training gave us the necessary skills and the confidence to go forward and
actually start to execute the changes that we needed to make and move into more state-of-the-art systems.
>>Scott: Well, Kelly, I think that pretty well summarizes our process and our operations.
>>Kelly: Well, thank you for having us here and for showing us all this interesting equipment. It's always nice to see
an industrial automation application in action, so it was great to be able to come here today.
And thank you guys for watching this video. I hope you found it as interesting as I found it.
If you would like more information about this application, or other applications, please visit the Opto 22 website.
Have a great day!