A new study by ARC entitled “Plant Asset Management Systems” notes that “Plant Asset Management (PAM) systems consist of a combination of hardware, software, and services”. For instance, assets like pumps, heat exchangers, air cooled exchangers (fin fans), blowers, cooling towers, and even some non-process compressors which are usually not instrumented have to be fitted out with transmitters and other hardware required to make measurements that can be used to diagnose the health and performance of these equipment using the appropriate software such as an Asset Management System (AMS) or a historian fitted with a real-time analytics component to compute equipment condition from the raw data from the sensors on the equipment using specific software algorithms created for each type of process equipment. For instance, calculate heat-duty for each heat exchanger bundle and trigger a notification when it gets too high. This equipment-level diagnostics turns ‘dumb’ equipment into ‘smart equipment’. Services are provided to help the plant deploy the solution since plant personnel is usually too busy to do it on their own.
The study explains these systems “help users identify problems before escalating to a catastrophic failure” to which I might personally also add that it is possible to make turnarounds shorter by checking the software first, before the turnarounds, to determine the health and performance of equipment as computed by the software based on the raw measurements. If the equipment such as a pump, heat exchanger, or a valve etc. has not fouled or failed, no time has to be spent on it during the turnaround. This makes the turnarounds shorter – that is, shorter planned downtime.
ARC highlights that this is about risk reduction; reducing the risk of equipment unexpectedly failing causing lost production, leaks, and even fires etc.
Another ARC observation is the availability of “industry specific packaged solutions for an increasing number of asset types” which corresponds very well to the pre-engineered asset monitoring packages for pumps, heat exchangers, air cooled exchangers, blowers, cooling towers, and compressors provided by Emerson.
Wireless is easiest and lowest risk type of instrumentation to deploy since there is no need to open up junction boxes and cable trays to lay cable; provided the wireless solution uses mesh network topology like WirelessHART does. A comparable result could not be achieved using a star-backbone topology. I personally believe that the high cost of 4-20 mA and on-off I/O and the risk of running wires in an existing plant is that have prevented these solutions in the past, and WirelessHART is the new non-intrusive technology now making pervasive sensing viable.
Instrumenting the assets around the plant with pervasive sensing and local software in the plant is the most common solution for asset monitoring. ARC also underscores that “The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) emphasizes remote access to connected machines and other devices, making remote monitoring for predictive purposes the initial target application for IIoT”. That is, in the future plants may rely on IoT or machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions for remote asset management from a central location, be it enterprise-level or third-party service provider. The WirelessHART sensors which plants are deploying on assets today to make those assets smart form the basis for future IoT and M2M solutions.
ARC concludes “PAM solutions help reduce unplanned downtime; increase asset reliability, safety, and integrity; extend asset life; and reduce costs. These benefits have a positive impact on profitability.” And I would personally also add reduced planned downtime thanks to shorter turnarounds. Here are a few in-depth articles on this topic:
Second Layer of Automation
http://www.ceasiamag.com/article/second-layer-of-automation/10354
Maintenance with a Hart
http://www.ceasiamag.com/article/maintenance-with-a-hart/9894
Wireless for Asset Uptime
http://www.ceasiamag.com/article/wireless-for-asset-uptime/8689
Note that in the past “Asset Management” and “Intelligent Devices Management” was often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Intelligent Devices Management (IDM) is just one part of Asset Management. The IDM portion manages intelligent devices, but asset management also encompasses health and performance of static equipment as described above, as well as monitoring of rotating machinery like turbines and compressors. Learn more about IDM here:
http://www.eddl.org/DeviceManagement/
Please talk to the maintenance and reliability engineers in your plant about automating maintenance inspection using a second layer of automation for these missing measurements and let me know what they think.