Rockwell Automation has developed a plant-wide redesign and modernisation programme for the complex polyester yarn production plant of Korteks in Bursa, Turkey, which houses more than 50 machines.

Korteks is one of Europe’s biggest fully integrated polyester continuous filament yarn manufacturers and the 335,000-square-metre plant has daily polymer production capacities of nearly 600 tons of yarn in various formats, including POY, FDY, texturized, twisted and air texturized.

The company faced a growing risk of unplanned downtime due to the obsolescence challenges within its legacy infrastructure, but also difficulties in the planning of its modernisation investment due to the complexity of its installed base.

After in-depth technical discussions and multiple site visits, Rockwell Automation devised a modernisation programme factoring in all the complexities of the existing infrastructure with minimum production disruptions.

“This phased modernisation approach is a textbook example of what can be achieved with the right planning, backed by proven hardware and supported by a highly knowledgeable technical team,” says Ediz Eren, Rockwell Automation country sales director in Turkey. “The three-year plan will see a complete plant-wide redesign with the final architecture delivering a fully digitalised platform that Korteks will be able to use to generate greater efficiencies.

“We examined each individual machine and developed bespoke machine-specific upgrade pathways that would keep downtime to an absolute minimum. Each individual plan then feeds into the overall plan, which will eventually deliver a standardised automation and control infrastructure that will greatly simplify maintenance, training, operation and future integration.”

“One of the most fundamental factors we considered was that production could not be stopped and each machine could be out of service for limited periods of time only,” adds Barış Mert, general manager of Korteks. “Our primary goal was to address the risks we anticipated, relating to obsolescent control hardware, but the secondary outcomes – provided by a fully digitalised architecture – will open the door to great operational improvement opportunities in the near future.”

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