Explosives Delivery System

ProtoLink personnel designed and developed a system to control the movement of high-explosives during their manufacturing process at an Army ammunition plant and managed the site acceptance test.  The system utilized three Allen-Bradley PLC 5/40L processors for control and five micro-computers running InTouch applications on a LAN for the operator interface.  Because of critical requirements concerning personnel safety and inventory auditing, memory images of important state variables were mirrored in each PLC.  The PLCs were programmed to validate all movement of explosives and to shutdown segments of the process when unscheduled events occurred.  The system provided automatic dispatching and routing of carriers for the explosive material, and provided a SQL database for inventory management and historical product tracking.