Helping Seeds Engineering Services

Helping seeds, as an industry, is something requiring expertise in technology and process. In one example a grass seed producer needed to batch seeds and other ingredients. Grass seed mix is a batching of multiple ingredients, typically including the seed, fertilizer and wood fiber or crumbles. Sometimes a helping hand is needed, such as providing engineering services for the batching and transfer of ingredients and mixed products.

Sterling Systems engineers and manufactures control panels that incorporate electronic automation hardware as well as software for the applications involved. In this case the end user provided the control panels, PLC (Allen Bradley), and scale hardware. In providing the engineering services for “Helping Seeds”, Sterling Systems was contracted to provide the software engineering, technical engineering writing, process control engineering, test and check out and onsite start-up services as well.

“Helping Seeds” basic engineering services included:

• Creating an Equipment List
• Identifying and documenting associated Input / Output details (Type and Voltage)
• Writing a Sequence of Operation
• Engineering Surge Hopper Refilling with enable/disable
• Engineering Set-Point Batching @ each scale/mixer, single ingredient
• PLC programming per flow diagram and discussions
• PanelView+ (PV+) programming per flow diagram (for both PV+7 and PV+15)