October 22, 2021

This year’s edition of the PLC workshop organized by the student association EESTEC and supported by Montelektro has gathered 30 students of various engineering disciplines, who presented their skills and practical knowledge about  PLC programming.

Within the task prepared by Mislav Gazdović, Montelektro’s automation expert and R&D Team Leader, the students were required to implement a PLC program for the automatic control of fermenting storage tank production sequence.

After a detailed acquaintance with the task and the necessary technologies, students had almost four days to implement the control algorithm.

Each team consisted of three students who worked on a design of a process control system that covers actual production steps such as initializing, filling, fermentation, deep cooling, maturation, emptying, and ending the process safely.  Within the task, the competitors had to create several functionalities visible on the Human Machine Interface (HMI) screen: a sequence start button, name, and duration of the currently active step, possibility of manual operator data input, as well as selection of the control strategy. Additionally, all alarms had to be programmed, configured, and visualized correctly.

The jury consisting of Mislav Gazdović and Professor Mario Vašak has also evaluated the quality of the proposed regulation solution, by performing simulations and evaluating the results for the cooling control algorithm based on the predefined criteria.  When reviewing the code quality, it was also important that the code was clearly structured and organized. Finally, the code had to be easily understandable such that it is easy to maintain and extend.

We are pleased to announce that the team named “PLCajkaši” scored the highest number of points and won the competition. The three programmers whose areas of interest include programmable logic controllers proposed the best solution which was properly rewarded.