The Great Northern Distillery is currently Ireland’s largest independent distillery. It operates pot stills and columns stills that produce a diverse range of Irish Whiskey spirit’s including Grain, Triple Malt, Double Malt, Peated Malt and Pot Still Whiskey. The distillery has a current capacity of 16 million litres of Whiskey spirit. The first 3 year old matured Irish Whiskey’s produced at the distillery came of age in 2018.

We were required to provide a completely new automation system design including OT network design, control panels design including pneumatics, PLC and connection of the existing plant to the new control system.

The PCS is based on Siemens WinCC and Profibus DP in fibre OLMs to facilitate the complex geographical nature of old plant. A fibre ring was installed including remote Industrial Network switches. The system controls and supervises over 3,000 IO points. As part of the integrated systems requirement for this distillery Rockbrook implemented and designed the OT network running Profibus DP and ATEX IO running Profibus PA. We needed to recommission the legacy plant and integrate with existing IO such as 3rd Party Separator / Milling / Weighing Controllers. We had to provide reliable ABV calculations using density and temperature and collect process data in WinCC which needed to be transferred to a 3rd Party.

We provide control of continuous and discrete processes and custom built easy to use graphical interfaces with audible alarms to assist plant operations.