Nippon Gases Targets Greater Resilience and Increased Uptime with Multi-Site Control System Modernization Program

Five-year, 18-site control system upgrade program is put in place to increase asset utilization, lower obsolescence risk, and reduce downtime

Rockwell Automation, Inc., the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, announced that Nippon Gases is undertaking a comprehensive company-wide modernization program that will see legacy Rockwell controllers replaced with contemporary ControlLogix programmable logic controllers (PLC).

Nippon Gases is one of the leading industrial and medical gases companies in Europe. Its operations cover the supply of gases – in various physical forms and purities – including oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, helium, carbon monoxide, and the services and technologies associated with the use of gases and mixtures.

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“The deployment of contemporary process-control modules opens up a world of opportunity for Nippon Gases,” said Rodrigo Riera, EMEA regional vice president for the southern region, Rockwell Automation. “As well as day-to-day operational enhancements, it can look more confidently to the future, with greater agility for further evolution, alongside the potential to add AI for more autonomous operations, which will deliver even greater efficiencies.”

The modernization program, which covers the company’s air separation unit (ASU) installations on multiple sites across Europe, is backed by a comprehensive migration strategy devised and developed jointly by Rockwell and Nippon Gases’ engineering team.

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“By standardizing on a single PLC solution, we can benchmark the migration process at the pilot plant in Aviles in Spain and then fine tune it for subsequent sites,” explains José Maria Martinez Gallo, Operations Director Europe, at Nippon Gases. “The new digitalized hardware will also give us much deeper insights into our processes, allowing us to realize even greater efficiency while lowering energy use and waste.”