Emerson Exchange 365

By Paul Studebaker

Leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) begins with generating continuous, in-depth, quality data on a plant’s assets. However, transforming that vast amount of data into actionable information requires powerful analytics that provide plant personnel with the specific information they need to ensure reliability and efficiency.

“In a typical organization, data flows are very complex due to complex work environments, silos and fragmented technologies,” said Phil Niccolls, vice president, industry marketing and applications, Emerson Automation Solutions, to press conference attendees Tuesday morning at Emerson Global Users Exchange this week in Austin, Texas. “It comes down to a lack of IT and OT convergence. Plantweb Advisor is our solution to help customers bring information and decision-makers together.”

Plantweb Advisor Suite is a key component of Emerson’s Plantweb digital ecosystem. Niccolls announced the addition of two new applications, Health Advisor and Performance Advisor, to the previously released Energy Advisor. All leverage the industry-standard OSIsoft Pi System’s highly scalable, open data infrastructure that captures and shapes data generated by equipment.

Empowering a plant’s reliability, process and energy experts with critical information can improve or restore a plant’s profitability to industry-leading levels. (Top Quartile performers can recover two weeks of available production per year as compared to their average industry peers). Estimates show that 47 percent of unplanned outages are due to equipment failure, and the cost of repairing a failed asset is 50 percent higher than addressing the problem prior to failure. Further compounding the issue, the petrochemical industries are experiencing up to a 40 percent loss in primary energy due to various inefficiencies.

Plantweb Advisor Suite is designed to help plants achieve significant improvement across these areas. For example, a 250,000 barrel-per-day refinery using the suite can recover as much as $15 million a year in maintenance savings and new revenue, specifically resulting from 1.2 percent capacity recovery, 14 percent maintenance reduction, and 10 percent energy recovery.

Health Advisor improves asset reliability, increases process availability and helps reduce safety and environmental risks by providing continuous diagnostics and equipment alerts prior to the occurrence of unplanned shutdowns or slowdowns. This information enables plant personnel to take corrective action and avoid production losses, expensive reactive maintenance and potential environment or safety incidents. The preconfigured application combines process and equipment data to provide a single asset health number for a plant’s essential assets, including air-cooled heater exchangers, blowers, compressors, cooling towers, heat exchangers and pumps. Overall asset health is weighted based on the criticality of the fault detected, and the solution monitors differences from a known good state. As process severity can, at times, outweigh mechanical severity, this approach ensures the most severe faults drive the determination of asset health.

Performance Advisor  is a real-time application that calculates equipment performance, enabling plant operators to run processes more efficiently, track operating performance against targets, schedule maintenance activities and determine the root cause of production asset inefficiencies. Performance Advisor achieves this by calculating thermodynamic-based equipment performance using first-principles models. These models monitor for deviations from design parameters on critical machinery, including turbines, compressors, boilers and other production assets.

Energy Advisor is a real-time Energy Management Information System (EMIS) that automates the process of mapping and managing energy consumption as it is being consumed. Real-time alerts, dashboards and emails signal when energy consumption is higher than expected so that actions may be taken to reduce energy costs. An easy-to-use reporting package makes standard reports available on demand to multiple users via a web-based interface. Examples include cost per unit (CPU) of production, energy key performance indicator (KPI) status and trend, cumulative sum of savings (CuSum) against target, and energy cost, trend and demand cost.