Inside the Automation at Jack Daniel's New Distillery

Jack Daniel's found it could automate a new distillery while maintaining old distillery operating philosophies with the use of new Siemens automation technologies.

Front view of the new Jack Daniel’s plant. Source: Jack Daniel’s.
Front view of the new Jack Daniel’s plant. Source: Jack Daniel’s.

The distilled spirits industry has been on an upswing over the past several years with the explosion of interest in craft cocktails and other related consumer trends. According to a report from the Distilled Spirits Council, American whiskey has been the major driver of growth in the distilled spirits industry—which has meant increased demand for iconic brands like Jack Daniel’s. As a result, Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, was operating at capacity on a regular basis and needed to expand operations to meet the growing demand.

With no room for expansion in the existing distillery, plans were developed to build a second distillery. The plan for this new facility was to “design an automated plant that preserved existing operating philosophies and that could scale by adding capacity in phases as needed and allow for grain bill flexibility,” said Juan Merizalde-Carrillo, project engineer at Jack Daniel’s Distillery, in a presentation explaining the automation aspects of this new distillery at Siemens Automation Summit 2016.

Merizalde-Carrillo explained that the control system at the existing facility (JD1) was comprised of 18 APACS+ controllers, Simatic PCS 7 operating system and 5,500 I/O points. For the new facility (JD2), “we wanted to implement new operator interface technologies, as well as new instrumentation, wireless networking and have the ability to connect the two plants,” he said. “We also wanted to be able to run JD2 at full capacity with just four Simatic PCS7 controllers and use Siemens Simatic Batch and Route Control software to enable expansion flexibility.”

In a collaborative approach to design the new automation system for JD2, responsibilities for Cross Company’s Integrated Systems Group (which provided system integration services for the project), Siemens and Jack Daniel’s broke out as follows:

  • Jack Daniel’s handled development of the plant’s modular design and build as well as the piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), process requirements, document approval, factory acceptance testing (FAT), device configuration, commissioning and startup.
  • Cross Company Integrated Systems Group focused on I/O list development, I/O panel design and build, HMI graphic development and program development for PCS 7, Simatic Batch and Simatic Route Control.
  • Siemens focused on hardware and software component selection, license requirements, virtual server setup, virtual machine configuration, Simatic software installation, and configuration and delivery of new field devices.

New plant, new automation
Presenting at Siemens 2016 Automation Summit along with Merizalde-Carrillo, Jeff Clark, systems integration engineer with Cross Company Integrated Systems Group, said that panel design and build activities for JD2 involved the development of 10 panels to connect more 2,000 I/O points and house four PCS7-410 controllers, 22 remote I/O racks and more than 200 I/O cards. A server cabinet houses two host machines, a process historian and an information server.

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