The user is a nationwide company that provides fuel solutions for land and sea vehicles. The storage facility has 34 tanks with a total capacity of 1.5 million gallons where loading, unloading, and mixing of over 20 different types of fuel takes place. The company´s headquarters is 31 miles away from the storage facility. The information about the inventory was measured and captured locally using manual techniques, and reported with a time delay of hours.

The challenge was to reduce reporting time and human errors.

The automation approach not only provided the solution to the challenge, but it also opened new improvements such as:
• Level datalogging for each tank to verify tank truck operations, record transfers between tanks and detect possible leaks.
• Graphic level trends for each tank for the current day or any other date within the past year.
• Remote access to consult inventory graphically or to download historical information files.
• Remote diagnostics of level transmitters and configuration of control equipment.

The proposed solution was a monitoring system based on an XL7 controller with a CsCAN remote IO station, a full WebMI license and 34 level transmitters. The system provides the following capacities, either from the local terminal, the local network, or through an internet webpage with a delay of mere seconds:
• Security through the usage of a user-password scheme, to differentiate between general users, company managers, and technicians.
• Graphics with the same look and feel for the user throughout all of the access options.
• Graphic representation of tanks showing instant levels in liters and meters.
• Alert notification when a tank is being loaded or unloaded.
• Indication of low or high levels for each tank using configured values.
• Use of FTP Access to download CSV files that contain historic level values for each tank.
• Access to instrument scaling, signal configuration, and equipment diagnostic information.

“We preferred Horner equipment mainly because of the WebMI functionality, ease of use and integration into the existing hardware and software platforms.”
~ Laura Aldana, Grupo Aurum, Nuevo León, México