Emerson Exchange 365

by Jim Montague

Everyone talks about “putting it all together,” but the PlantWeb Excellence and Best-in-Track award winners at Emerson Global Users Exchange 2013 actually do it.

CHS Inc.’s small refinery in Laurel, Mt., just completed a nine-year upgrade program that implemented many manifestations of Emerson's PlantWeb architecture and won this year’s PlantWeb Excellence Award. The refinery adopted:

• DeltaV and DeltaV Insight with about 10,000 tags;
• DeltaV SIS process safety system;
• AMS Suite: Intelligent Device Manager software for about 5,000 tags;
• Fisher valves and Rosemount transmitters;
• Smart radar tank gauging equipment;
• WirelessHART components for its tanks, pumps, stacks and water systems;
• FOUNDATION fieldbus-based RTUs;
• Electronic marshalling with CHARMs, including 46 CHARMs I/O cards;
• Virtualized engineering development system; and
• Operating training system with simulation.

Deborah Colclazier, CHS senior automation engineer, and Ken Paulson, CHS refinery process engineer, accepted the award for their presentation, “Rags to Riches—0% to 100% in Nine Years: A Small Refinery’s PlantWeb Journey.” The award was announced at a group luncheon on the fourth day of Emerson Global Users Exchange. CHS is a Fortune 100 company that’s owned by farmers, ranchers and co-ops nationwide. It supplies energy, crop nutrients, grain and food. Besides its two refineries in Laurel and McPherson, Kan., it operates 1100 miles of pipelines with 250 terminals, and operates more than 1,400 Cenex-brand retail outlets.

Savings produced by implementing PlantWeb and all its related equipment at the Laurel refinery included:

• $1 million from CHARMs electronic marshalling;
• $600,000 from using DeltaV S-series controllers to reduce footprint;
• $2.8 million from using Rosemount 848T foundation fieldbus transmitters
• $65,000 per year in improved diagnostics and reliability by cutting callouts by 95%;
• $900,000 by adopting wireless and reducing cabling;
• $2-4 million per year by using DeltaV to eliminate spurious trips;
• $10,000 on DeltaV SIS testing in 2013;
• $1.5 million by using improved tank gauging to prevent an overfill incident; and
• $1.6 million in operating efficiencies gained with virtualized engineering and training systems.

“Our refinery is also maintained with half of the maintenance staff of our sister plant, even though we have the same I/O,” stated Colclazier. “Also, we have remote fire monitoring of unmanned buildings for improved safety, and we reduce commissioning time using AMS as our tool of choice.”

Meanwhile, 11 best-in-track awards were presented to winners in 10 categories at the lunchtime event.

Asset Optimization and Maintenance/Reliability
Presenters Julio Magalhães of Braskem and Fabio Chrispim of Emerson Process Management won for “Online Vibration Monitoring at Braskem in Brazil: How to avoid unplanned shutdown using the predictive diagnostics of PeakVue.” Using the diagnostic capabilities of Asset Management Suite’s (AMS) machinery health manager and a CSI online vibration monitor, Braskem found excessive vibration in its radial bearing pump supply reactor. It identified a specific bearing as the cause, and recommended a planned shutdown, but the plant also needed to stay in production for several days to fulfill a customer commitment. If the production system had been forced to shut down due to an unexpected failure, emergency repairs would have a cost to the company more than $400,000 in lost revenue.

Business Management
Presenter Javier Hernandez Gallegos, vice president for metals and chemical operations at Met-Mex Peñoles, won for “Effective Management for Improving Productivity: The Peñoles Case.” The Metals and Chemicals division at Peñoles put in practice three principles on the operations floor—continuous improvement, operational discipline and teamwork—to assemble several kinds of tools, systems and initiatives to help increase daily productivity. The division put its workers in the center of its efforts, and found that engaging people is the foundation for transforming its culture.

Control System Modernization
Presenters Tony Hosey, powerhouse operations manager, and Mike Dance, both of Phillip Morris USA, along with Barbara Hamilton of Emerson, won for “Awesome! Steam Turbine Control using DeltaV, DCG, and CSI.” More than $300,000 in annual operational savings were realized when Phillip Morris replaced an obsolete OEM turbine generator control system with an Emerson solution that includes DeltaV, DGC exciter controls, and CSI machinery health monitoring. The flexible system has multiple turbine control modes that are presented to the operator on the existing DeltaV system. Immediate improvements were realized, including reduced steam venting and increased power generation.

Control Systems/SCADA Applications and Virtualization
Presenters Goran Palibrk, general manager at Clearstone SIRA Ltd., and Clinton Tonge, SCADA systems specialist at Alpine Systems Integration, won for “Remote Monitoring, Quantifying and Reporting of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions using Emerson SCADA Technologies.” In many industrial installations, there’s an absence of dedicated technology to track and quantify GHG emissions. In many areas, this is a requirement by environmental watchdogs or government agencies. Also, it can expose process waste and lost revenue as a result. By deploying Emerson’s OpenEnterprise (OE) SCADA solution, RTUs and instruments, Clearstone Engineering developed a sophisticated, web-based data acquisition system for GHG analysis and reporting. The system provides clients access to data, and reports at various installations globally via a secure web portal hosted in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Instrumentation Applications
The first winners, presenters Pete Olson of American Crystal Sugar and Darin Hook of Emerson, won for “Automating Waste Slurry Process Utilizing Real-Time Density and Flow.” American Crystal Sugar has five factories, and it implemented an automation program to eliminate manual sampling of waste mud slurry, which had been a bottleneck and created problems due to the lack of real-time responses to changing composition. Utilizing multivariable outputs (flow and density) from Coriolis meters, precision flow from magnetic flowmeters, and integrating these outputs into a Delta V control system and AMS Suite asset management software eliminated the bottlenecks, improved waste processing efficiency, and saved more than $300,000 per year in chemical usage alone.

The second winners, Michael Kleemann of Alstom and Michael Kamphus of Emerson, presented, “Instrumentation for direct turbine control of a 400 MW natural gas fired turbine with ultra low NOx emissions.” As a provider of turnkey, power-generation solutions, Alstom developed the compact GT24 and GT26 sequential combustion gas turbines to face current challenges in the power industry, including shifting consumption trends, more stringent emission legislation, and flexibility in fuel gas composition. The online analysis of fuel gas properties with a fast gas analyzer allows for an efficient and safe engine operation over a wide range of compositions. Added instrumentation includes pressure transmitters and a gas chromatograph. Micro Motion Coriolis meters are presently under validation at Alstom.

Process Optimization
Presenters Qiwei Li, production engineer, and Robert Wojewodka, both of Lubrizol Corp., and Terry Blevins, principal technologist at Emerson, won for “Application of On-line Data Analytics to a Continuous Process Polybutene Unit.” Continuous data analytics may be used to provide an on-line prediction of quality parameters, and enable on-line detection of fault conditions. The analytics software distinguishes parameters that may not typically be considered during normal quality monitoring analyses. In this workshop, they presented field trial results for 2013 at Lubrizol’s continuous polybutene process. Their presentation demonstrated the on-line continuous data analytics program, evaluated the success of model improvements, and summarized the implementation of the user end platform in the process unit.

Project Management and Engineering Tools
Presenter Jan de Rijke, engineering manager at Momentive Specialty Chemicals, won for “How Value Engineering can create $$$’s for your DCS Projects.” Rijke reported that DCS project managers often face problems after a FEED study shows investment estimates far exceed initial guesstimates, and so it’s impossible to get final approval because management doesn’t want to spend on it. Also, plants don’t want to reduce the scope of the project because they need the functionality, and suppliers have been squeezed and there is nothing to gain there anymore either. The only thing that a DCS project manager can do is to organize a value engineering workshop, and that’s what Momentive did.

Safety Instrumented Systems
Presenters Manish Badlani Process, automation Met-2 and MES owner at the Dow Chemical Co., and Dave Bartlett, solutions architect at Proconex, won for “A View to a SIL: Monitoring Global Safety Health at a Glance with DeltaV SIS and Syncade Message Broker.” Dow Coatings Materials has more than 24 DeltaV SIS systems installed globally. Bypassed interlocks, configuration changes and other overlooked problems could lead to a failure to trip when an unsafe condition exists. Conversely, improper configuration can lead to spurious trips that impede production. Using information from DeltaV’s Event Chronicle and Syncade’s Message Broker allowed Dow to extract data out of every plant worldwide, and see in one quick glance where safety related issues exist and improvements can be made.

Valve Applications
Presenters Parimala Desai of KBR and Keith Herbsleb of Puffer-Sweiven won for “Performance Optimization of Atmospheric Vent Silencer Systems in Process Plants.” This paper addresses KBR’s approach for optimizing atmospheric steam vent systems. The idea was to design the valve and silencer together, and consider how modifying one component affects the others. The focus was on optimizing acoustic performance, pressure drop and cost. This approach suggests that the vent system should be considered and designed as a package.

Wireless Applications
Presenters Steve Giddens of Ergon Refining Inc., Kirk Giles of John H. Carter, and Thierno Gueye of Emerson won for “Wireless Mobile Worker Performs Loop Checks During Turnaround.” Ergon Refining in Vicksburg, Miss., was looked at putting Panasonic Toughbooks in the hands of instrumentation technicians and operators to make them truly mobile. This allowed them to do loop checks for the turnaround.