Emerson Exchange 365

MOL Petrolkémia, formerly known as TVK, is the largest petrochemical company and sole polyolefin producer in Hungary. Before 2013, one of their olefin plants experienced significant profit and production loss due to several spurious shutdowns caused by condensate build up and plugging in the impulse lines of the differential pressure flowmeters in its compressors. When this happened, the transmitter output no longer reflected the actual process dynamics.

This week, at the Emerson Global Users Exchange, Tibor Poór of MOL Petrolkemia joined Norbert Nagy and Erik Mathiason of Emerson Process Management to explain how reliability monitoring helped the plant avoid additional costly shutdowns.

MOL uses a five-stage pyrogas compressor in its olefin-2 facility. Differential pressure (DP) flow is measured at three stages (two twin stages and one single stage) using impulse piping. Each DP measurement is part of a safety loop that will open the by-pass valves and set the compressor to safety position and, subsequently could shut down the entire plant. With an estimated cost of $800,000 a day for each olefin shutdown, it was imperative for the plant to implement the right and reliable solution.

MOL chose solution using Emerson’s Smart Wireless THUM Adapter to access advanced diagnostics data via WirelessHART communications without affecting the wired 4-20mA SIS loop integrity. The implementation also involved replacing Rosemount 3051 transmitters with Rosemount 3051S series instruments with advanced diagnostics, to provide statistical process monitoring used to detect plugged impulse lines before the condition drives a spurious shutdown. The plant also relies on AMS Suite predictive maintenance software to configure and monitor the advanced diagnostics data using an interface based on user-friendly human-centered design.

Two months after commissioning, the plant avoided a sudden shutdown due to early detection of impulse line plugging and the ability to perform immediate maintenance. This enabled them to avoid any loss in production and increased the reliability of the plant. Since then, there have been no unplanned shutdowns caused by this issue in the olefin-2 facility.