AUTOMATIC CONTROL OF CAUSTIC SODA CONCENTRATION IN BOTTLE WASHING MACHINE USING PLC

Abstract

The PLC is one of the current control units. The PLC now becomes very necessary control unit for many factories. In soft drinks bottling factories, there are critical problems facing these factories. One of these problems has occurred in the bottle washing machines during cleaning the bottles. There are several stages of cleaning the bottles. In the first stage cleaning bottles is done by fresh water. In the second stage cleaning bottles is done by caustic soda. In this stage there must be limited concentration of caustic soda. Unfortunately, concentration of caustic soda is not stable. Sometime it becomes lower and at other times it becomes higher, and this results in some problems such as unclean bottles and cost effective. If the concentration of caustic soda is lower, bottles will be dirty and higher concentration leads to higher cost. The objective of this project is to use a PLC to control caustic soda concentration instead of manual adding caustic soda by operators supervised by Chemical Engineers. Caustic soda will be added automatically to avoid unbalanced caustic soda concentration.