Emerson Exchange 365

As part of a recent modernization cycle, oil & gas producer INA built a total of six new processing units at two of its refineries in Croatia, all controlled by Emerson Process Management's DeltaV^TM process automation system and equipped almost entirely with Emerson field instruments. While most of the essential technology was supplied by one vendor, the challenges involved in keeping each of the six units up and running have proven to be complex.

Each of the new processing units at INA’s Rijeka and Sisak plants were assembled by different contractors from different countries, each with its own environmental standards. To add another layer of complexity, management required that the three units built at the Rijeka facility—a hydrocracker, a hydrogen generation unit, and a sulfur recovery unit—be fully integrated with a single control and safety system.

“Thankfully we realized early on that a project of such magnitude would require an integrated long-term approach to maintenance,” said INA senior instrumentation maintenance expert Dalibor Matijević, who discussed the company's predictive maintenance program along with Emerson’s Andrej Samardžić this week at the 2014 Emerson Global Users Exchange in Stuttgart, Germany.

“In order to minimize downtime and prevent accidents, we decided to implement an advanced predictive maintenance strategy,” Matijević said. The maintenance program is based on a two-year contract with Emerson that covers all installed systems and guarantees the on-demand availability of Emerson specialists and critical spare parts.

The operational agreement specifies that Emerson is to carry out a combination of mandatory and non-mandatory maintenance activities at regular intervals, with an eye toward keeping critical hardware and software installations from becoming outdated. A dedicated Emerson engineer was assigned to the Rijeka plant to oversee regular as well as preventive maintenance services for the control, asset management, and operator training simulator systems installed there.

“Mandatory network and system performance checks are conducted along with power and grounding diagnostics, virus protection sweeps, and fieldbus performance checks on a regular basis. Our agreement specifies that spare parts and support personnel are to be available onsite within three hours, with contingencies built in for overtime, on-call interventions and extra spare parts,” said Samardžić.

The capital expenditure component of the contract called for hardware refreshment and system upgrades to replace the five year-old servers and workstations at the Rijeka refinery. Working with Emerson, INA was able to complete hardware refreshment and necessary application upgrades during the scheduled plant turnaround project in just ten days. This was very challenging because a large number of safety instrumented loops connected with the Emerson system had to be checked and verified in accordance with legislative requirements.

“Critical maintenance activities are now performed at regular intervals using a standardized system of procedures and checklists, with results logged into a continually updated electronic record,” said Matijević. “Joint reviews are conducted frequently by INA and Emerson to ensure that we focus on those activities that have the most positive impact, rather than just doing the same thing year after year. As a result we have experienced zero downtime at either plant since the program was put into place, and operational efficiency has improved significantly. This approach has also reduced the overall cost and downtime of field equipment at the two plants because all diagnostics are performed through the integrated Emerson AMS solution, which allows us to focus on replacing and repairing equipment that needs our immediate attention. We definitely plan to continue using this model for future projects.”