00:07
Hi. Kelly from Opto 22 here. I'm not in the office
today, because today I'm in Foothill Ranch,
00:12
California, here at the headquarters of
Lumenyte International Corporation. Lumenyte
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has been producing fiber-optic lighting for
over 26 years now, and they have a very interesting
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process control application, which they've
offered to show us. Let's go check it out.
00:28
>>Kelly: I'm now sitting down with Scott Dill from Lumenyte.
Mr. Dill, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
00:34
>>Scott: Sure. I've been with the company since the
start, in production and operations management.
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I'm currently the facilities and
production operations manager.
00:45
>>Kelly: Can you kind of explain to us what Lumenyte does?
>>Scott: We manufacture fiber-optics and put together
00:50
lighting systems. We manufacture illumination
sources. We're moving into LED illumination
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sources. Recently we've had a lot of new business
stemming from the Homeland Security and the
01:01
military aspects of things, providing security
solutions that are designed to help with
01:08
inspections, primarily for explosives and
things of that like. The potential for green
01:14
lighting, or environmentally-sound lighting
and energy-conservation lighting in conjunction
01:21
with solar light sources: that's a potential
frontier. It's your imagination that's really
01:26
the limitation for the applications and the uses
of the fiber-optics and combination of light sources.
01:32
>>Kelly: So, when you guys
are making your fiber-optics,
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what's one of the largest challenges
that you have to overcome in the process?
01:40
>>Scott: Maintaining very strict consistency and very
very tight tolerances and specifications.
01:47
The environmental conditions need to be very
tight in order to have a consistent result
01:52
in turning out this product. We bring together
different aspects. Um, we have polymerization,
01:59
casting, we have to bring the chemicals together,
we have the chemical processes and purifications.
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We have to have a nice tight control process,
because it's very difficult to control the
02:11
polymerization of a product
over a long length like that.
02:13
>>Kelly: So, I realize Lumenyte's process is
proprietary, but do you mind showing us some of
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your control equipment in action?
>>Scott: Sure.
02:25
>>Scott: Hi. We're out in the production area now,
adjacent to the casting chamber. I wanted
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to introduce Paul Robbins at this time.
He's our VP of Operations and he helps oversee
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all of the operations in general. What you
are just looking at is the main casting chamber.
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All of the thermal sensors and valves that
allow us to control the hot and cold attributes
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of this process reside up and down the length
of this chamber. And all of the equipment
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hooks into the equipment pad over here, the
tanks and what we call the ARS or air refrigeration
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system. And all of this stuff that's on the
chamber and the pad is all wired back into
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the control panel, and this is where the
Opto 22 control equipment and hardware resides
03:13
and is controlled from there.
All right, we're coming into the control room,
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our little room that we do all of the set-up
and start-up and shut-down and monitoring from.
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The computers are in here and HMIs are
available for us in here. This is our main
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monitoring page. It shows us most of the attributes
and the process, and it enables us to monitor
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almost all of the different aspects of the
process and make sure they keep going right,
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the pumps are moving at the right speeds,
that the sensors are activating when they
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are supposed to activate, and reading all
the proper temperatures. And we can go onto
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a couple of other screens such as this one
which helps us monitor in more detail things
03:57
like the cooling system. And back to the reactor
we've also got a series of input pages for
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the operators where they start the system,
inputting the different information parameters
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for each particular production run.
>>Randy: When I first became involved with
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the project was to provide backup to
our engineering and production staff in the
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event that we had issues that needed to be
dealt with. As the Director of IT for this company,
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I am pretty much involved with anything
that has an engineering process or computer
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application or software that's installed to
provide services for the project to be completed.
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Our fear was that if we went in and we started
making changes without having proper education
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as our background, we would upset our system.
This system being the lifeblood of our organization
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we could not afford to do that. So that being
the case, we went to the Opto 22 training
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and received a great welcome from the Opto 22
staff, and phenomenal training. The hospitality
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was tremendous, as well as the professionalism
of the trainers, the entire staff that we
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dealt with. So the training gave us the necessary
skills and the confidence to go forward and
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actually start to execute the changes that we needed
to make and move into more state-of-the-art systems.
05:20
>>Scott: Well, Kelly, I think that pretty well
summarizes our process and our operations.
05:24
>>Kelly: Well, thank you for having us here and for showing
us all this interesting equipment. It's always nice to see
05:30
an industrial automation application in action,
so it was great to be able to come here today.
05:35
And thank you guys for watching this video.
I hope you found it as interesting as I found it.
05:40
If you would like more information about this application,
or other applications, please visit the Opto 22 website.