Refining Blog

Improving Tank Farm Flexible Operations

Jim Cahill — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 12:30:36 GMT

Refineries typically either use third-party storage terminals or have their own tank farms as part of their operations. A Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance article, Better business results through flexible logistics operations, shares how these refineries can improve the flexibility as well as safety, efficiency, and reliability of their tank farm operations.

For some of these refineries:

…that also handle fuel blending before transporting final products, flexibility and agility are even more vital since blends are becoming increasingly complex due to ever-changing regulations and market demand.

Safety and regulatory compliance are top operational imperatives.

Implementing advanced automation, predictive maintenance technology, and overfill protection can help them achieve these goals. Plus, tank farms that discontinue manual maintenance practices, especially in hazardous areas, will keep personnel safe by using wireless technology as the enabler to automate tank gauging, as well as pump and valve operations.

These technologies also enable personnel flexibility to allow the collaboration of third-party suppliers to improve operational agility and reduce fixed costs. Decision Support Software (DSS), such as Emerson’s TerminalManager terminal management system, help to better manage scheduling and solve:

…other challenges, such as customer transfer, logistical, inventory, safety, and environmental issues—while gaining a large return on investment—to achieve Top Quartile performance.

Read the article for more on how the world’s largest independent terminal company improved business performance and how tank farms can increase overall reliability.

Visit the Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance section on Emerson.com to download the full guide and for other articles on ways to drive operational performance improvements. You can also connect and interact with other refining industry experts in the Refining group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Successful Refinery Digital Transformation Journey

Jim Cahill — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 13:00:49 GMT

A Hydrocarbon Processing article, Ergon Refining: A digital transformation story, provides a great illustration of a step-wise, scalable digital transformation journey that continues to drive business improvements. The authors, Ergon Refining’s Steve Elwart and Emerson’s Marcelo Carugo, share this journey and the results achieved.

They open describing the importance of Ergon Refining’s culture in this initiative.

By embracing a judicious, culture-driven approach to applying new automaton solutions, the company has achieved transformative results in a market that has seen significant volatility and increasing competition throughout the industry.

The manufacturing process requirements were also an important in this effort.

Their process is unique: the plant produces specialty petroleum products using a distributed control system (DCS). During product loading, it is imperative to maintain the highest standards of product consistency, repeatability, quality and stability—all critical to Ergon’s business model.

Company culture and leadership were critical in managing change.

What makes Ergon different from most other refiners is not only the specialty aspect of its business, but also its tightly woven, family-oriented corporate culture. The company’s leadership has implemented a digitalization plan and a philosophy that has guided the organization through periods of change and modernization.

Two key questions drive projects:

Why change, and why risk investing in new, unproven technology?

Steve shares how projects were justified based on best practices or showing:

“…where a lack of technology has affected us and then use that to paint a clearer picture of how we could improve performance, which helps upper management see the value in investing in automation.”

Key to their strategy in being an early adopter of new technologies was starting small, proving it out, and scaling up successes. Choosing where best to invest centered on three criteria:

…scalability, workforce empowerment, and IT/OT integration. Management identified a handful of operational challenges—some obvious and others that were added to the list over time—and set about searching for solutions that met the criteria.

Steve and Marcelo highlight specific projects that drove improvements in product consistency, repeatability, quality, and stability. Steve described the initial project:

“We began installing a proprietary wireless sensor on one pressure relief valve to detect potential issues with its rupture disc, as an extra safety layer…Once we felt comfortable, we installed sensors on 33 more discs, saving us thousands of dollars on wiring costs.”

Other projects highlighted included:

Safety & security continuous monitoring of a remote chemical storage building
Wireless smoke detectors
Blower & fan asset predictive maintenance monitoring
Analytics for alarm management
Blend system optimization
DCS workstation virtualization
Automation and integration of order-entry system with business management software

Read the article for more on each of these projects and how they improved operational performance along Ergon Refining’s digitalization journey.

Visit the Refining section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies and solutions that drive business performance improvements. You can also request a copy of the Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance to help you in your initiatives.

The post Successful Refinery Digital Transformation Journey appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.

Digital Transformation Planning and Execution

Jim Cahill — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 19:54:56 GMT

What often holds manufacturers and producers back on their digital transformation journeys is where to begin and how best to proceed. For those in the chemical process industries, Emerson’s Tim Olsen has written a Chemical Engineering Progress (CEP) article, Understanding the Digital Transformation.

Tim opens with a great definition of digital transformation:

Digital transformation refers to the leveraging of industrial internet of things (IIoT) technologies, software, services, and expertise to expand digital intelligence throughout a workforce, as well as augment workflows and processes to create new efficiencies and competencies that affect culture and behavioral change within a company.

The key is to:

…fundamentally change operational procedures or establish new strategic initiatives across the entire organization…

Tim notes that the amount of information available to downstream producers has exploded.

A single-train refinery built in the 1990s was designed to have 20,000 hard I/O points—i.e., distributed control system (DCS) field input/output (I/O) connections. Today, that same single-train refinery would be designed to have 50,000 I/O points.

Developing a plan on how to better use this additional data to drive business performance improvements is a challenge.

Because no two operations are truly the same and every facility is at a different stage in its digital maturity, each facility will need a customized plan. Understanding where a facility currently is and where it needs to go is an important step in creating a digital transformation roadmap.

Tim explains that a digital transformation initiative starts with a clear vision and fit with the overall corporate strategy. He shares important steps in planning and implementing the strategy in a scalable approach:

Perform a gap analysis
Lead from the top down
Identify missing data and required analytics
Implement to project and train staff
Confirm and document results

Read the article for more on each of these steps and examples of applications where digital transformations have occurred including catalyst performance monitoring, utility bottleneck identification and mitigation, emissions reporting automation, asset monitoring and analysis, and the use of advanced analytics and machine learning.

Visit the Downstream Hydrocarbons section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies, solutions and services to help drive your successful digital transformation strategy. You can also connect and interact with other digital transformation experts in the IIoT & Digital Transformation group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Digital Innovations in Refining

Jim Cahill — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 14:53:24 GMT

The World Refining Association:

…exists to facilitate knowledge sharing and nurturing of business partnerships within the downstream oil and gas sector. We help the industry share knowledge, with a focus on new technology and in particular technology that improves efficiency and increases plant productivity.

This November 17-18, they’ll be conducting ERTC Virtual: Europe’s Virtual Meeting Place for Downstream Leaders. This event is:

…the industry-leading online platform for refiners and technology providers from across Europe to discuss the challenges in overcoming COVID-19.

Emerson’s Marcelo Carugo will present on November 18 as part of the ERTC Digitalisation Technologies technical stream. His session, Digital Innovations in refinery safety in a Post-COVID 19 environment, will address:

Improving safety of our personnel and plants is stressed out in the post-COVID-19 times
Adapting with reduced crews and social distancing.
Incorporating digital innovations in plant management to achieve higher levels of occupational safety and reduced risks of containment loss

Refineries around the globe are having to cope with this global pandemic and rethink their work processes and accessibility to people and information. Digitalization can help by adding continuous monitoring where periodic manual monitoring was done.

Register today to hear Marcelo share how these technologies are being applied to cope with COVID-19 and improve refinery business performance. Also, visit the Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance to learn more ways to transform your operations.

The post Digital Innovations in Refining appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.

Better Ways to Design and Organize Product Selection Efforts for Future Reference

Jim Cahill — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 06:00:33 GMT

Emerson’s Seth Natala and Dan Cychosz show how to apply new engineering design tools when selecting a DP flow meter and other instrumentation.

Anyone who has tried to troubleshoot an equipment problem might have wondered how a specific piece was selected in the first place. This happens because few companies have a useful mechanism for gathering and organizing such information. The selection process information might be lost for not only repair and maintenance purposes, but also for future selection of similar instruments.

There is now an answer for this challenge, and we discuss it in our article in the August issue of Flow Control. The article focuses on DP flow meters as an example, but the same methodology can apply to any instrument selection. The answer involves a centralized, cloud-based selection and data management system.

A cloud-based digital workspace and data management platform, accessible by everyone, has multiple benefits. This allows an engineer (or technician, procurement person, department manager, etc.) to design a personalized space, while working in a larger context where everything can be saved and indexed to support collaboration. Realizing and implementing this should involve several key areas. Some are designed to support a specific individual and should allow for customization, while others should be accessible by multiple individuals and even various departments. This calls for consistency in presentation and procedures.

As a case in point, when an engineer is tasked with selecting a DP flow meter, the system will include all the necessary design tools for this specific selection process, and it will retain the operational parameters used to make the final choice. This system is MyEmerson Personalized Digital Experience, and it is a suite of digital tools that deliver measurable productivity gains through streamlined processes and elevated collaboration. It documents the entire thought process, making it available to others for review and future reference.

Digital engineering tools like these help engineers collaborate, gain confidence in evolving industries and streamline time-consuming manual processes. With online sizing, selection and configuration tools for instrumentation, valves, actuators, fluid control, pneumatic and electrical solutions, engineers can confidently and accurately specify solutions for their unique requirements and process conditions. By employing digital tools, engineers can configure instrumentation up to 93% faster, potentially saving dozens of engineering hours annually per instrument.

The article goes into more detail on how all the MyEmerson elements fit together, plus it offers some practical pointers on selecting DP flow meters, such as Emerson’s Rosemount 3051SFP Integral Orifice Flow Meter.

What’s the situation at your facility? Is the product selection process, along with many other routine engineering functions, done manually without collaboration or documentation? Given tools like MyEmerson, the old-fashioned way is now the hard way.

Visit the MyEmerson and DP Flow Measurement pages at Emerson.com for more on these technologies and solutions. You can also connect and interact with other engineers in the Chemical, Oil & Gas, and other groups at the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

The post Better Ways to Design and Organize Product Selection Efforts for Future Reference appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.

Continuous Condition Monitoring Cuts Costs

Jim Cahill — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 16:49:54 GMT

In an article in the AFPM Summit Conference News, Emerson’s Jacob Swafford makes the case for continuous versus intermittent condition monitoring.

I don’t think I have ever met a maintenance manager who said that condition monitoring is a waste of time. They agree it’s important but most shrug and say, “I wish we could do more, but we don’t have the resources.”

Refineries and chemical plants that don’t monitor the condition of pumps and compressors often run installations to failure, or very close to it. This requires switching to a redundant unit or stopping production until the failure can be fixed. The result, in any case, is a lot of reactive repair work, made all the more expensive by running until something breaks.

In my article in the AFPM Summit Conference News, I make the point that today’s technologies make continuous monitoring far easier and less expensive than it has ever been. It is also a lot more effective than even the best manual checking.

Manual collection of vibration data on pumps and compressors requires excessive manpower and only results in recording intermittent values, making it quite possible to miss important data. In contrast, when an organization monitors pumps continuously, maintenance personnel are immediately alerted of any changes. The lower cost of sensing and computing also makes it possible to not only deploy condition monitoring, but also predictive analytics at the asset edge for better, faster insights into asset health and performance.

As one of our customers discovered, even if they were very conscientious and managed to perform manual pump monitoring rounds every 30 days, it wasn’t enough. Many problems had plenty of time to develop and run to failure between those rounds.

The solution to adopt continuous condition monitoring is far simpler today thanks to product developments such as Emerson’s AMS Asset Monitor and AMS Wireless Vibration Monitor. These are easy to install since they are self-powered and communicate wirelessly, so no wired infrastructure is required. Data from these devices can be captured and analyzed using AMS Machine Works v1.6. It combines predictive maintenance techniques with comprehensive analysis tools to provide easy and accurate assessment of the machinery health in the facility.

So, what is your situation? Are you still trying to do your monitoring manually? Are you ready for a change? Visit the Condition Monitoring pages at Emerson.com for more on technologies and solutions for pumps and compressors. You can also connect and interact with other engineers in the Chemical and Oil & Gas Groups at the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Fuel Blending Unlocks Refinery Cash Register

Jim Cahill — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 17:42:35 GMT

For refiners, effectively and efficiently blending the refined fuels enables margin improvements. Yet, many refineries fail to give their blending area the attention it deserves. It’s worth reconsidering since fuel blending is essentially the “cash register” of the business.

Because this area is where profits can be made or lost, it should receive the investments necessary to be efficient and flexible, and able to quickly accommodate changes in product blend and shipping schedules. Also, the continuing evolution toward more stringent product specifications places increasing pressure on the blending area to get it right the first time.

In an article from the Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance, Fuel blending: The key to unlocking your refinery’s cash register, Emerson’s Patrick Truesdale shares why changing the traditional way of holding inventory by adopting inline blending can eliminate expenses associated with building and maintaining tanks and save millions in working capital by no longer holding excessive inventory.

Patrick shares how a current industry leader saved millions by reducing tankage inventory and significantly reduced product giveaway costs. Using the right inline blending analyzer can also improve quality testing processes, saving time and cost.

Plus, enhanced automation, monitoring technology, and more precise control is the most economical way to respond to current blending complexity trends requiring blenders to process additional components to meet more stringent product specifications and handle increased throughput. By improving fuel blending operations, refineries also enhance reliability and efficiency—driving down unplanned process upsets and downtime.

Patrick notes that in the U.S. market alone, refiners lose about $3 billion each year due to quality giveaway. By upgrading the blender with advanced automation technologies, refineries can improve margins by minimizing product giveaway and excess touch-ups, as well as more easily maintain regulatory compliance.

Download the Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance for this article and more on ways to drive safer operations and improved business performance. And, visit the Improving Blending Flexibility and Profitability section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies, solutions and practices to make it happen.

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Driving Safety Improvements through Flow Measurement Advancements

Jim Cahill — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 15:58:16 GMT

In the oil & gas upstream, midstream and downstream industries, flow measurement is critical for accurate fiscal and custody transfer accounting. But what about their use to make these processes safer?

In a Hydrocarbon Processing article, Leveraging modern flow technologies to improve safety in refineries, Emerson’s Meha Jha and Julie Valentine describe how advancements in these flow measurements, “…enhance safety and improve uptime, flexibility and efficiency, while securing their competitive position in a dynamic market.”

While flow measurement repeatability has always been important, Meha and Julie note that advancements:

…such as accuracy, inline meter health verification and integral design—have proven beneficial to enable refineries to optimize processes, ensure environmental compliance and improve process safety, while ensuring reliable and repeatable measurements for process control.

These technology advancements are included in:

…Coriolis meters, vortex meters and density meters [hyperlinks added].

Traditionally, to collect density and concentration measurements:

…personnel are often required to go into the field, open tap points and manually pull samples to send to the lab. In addition to risks due to time in the field and potential exposure to harmful chemicals, it is difficult to get a consistent representative sample.

Meha and Julie share a better way.

Installing an insertion meter or in-line density or concentration meter in the process line or on a slipstream can be a simple, cost-effective way to improve safety while providing continuous online gas or liquid density readings. These meters not only monitor output density but also other variables, such as API gravity, percent concentration and specific gravity.

Flow measurement devices such as Micro Motion Coriolis flow meters:

…provide online readings in a single device for the measurement of mass flow, volumetric flow and liquid density. Process unit mass balance points are a great application area where Coriolis meters can provide safety and optimization benefits with the highly accurate, continuous measurements needed to close balances, assess unit performance and develop optimization models.

Read the article for more as they share specific applications such as measuring hydrogen purity, automating tank dewatering, performing flow meter health verification, ensuring piping wall integrity and leak detection, providing compressor surge detection for antisurge control and more.

Visit the Flow Measurement section on Emerson.com for more on these advancements that help refiners and petrochemical producers drive safer, more reliable and more efficient operations. You can also connect and interact with other flow measurement experts in the Measurement Instrumentation group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Extending Existing WirelessHART Networks to Improve Worker and Plant Safety

Jim Cahill — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 17:28:12 GMT

In a Hydrocarbon Engineering article, Emerson’s Amanda Alexander describes two ways to extend existing wireless networks for worker location and toxic gas monitoring.

Emerson colleagues who were around back at the dawn of WirelessHART tell me the earliest deployments were usually limited to monitoring applications. At that time there wasn’t a long enough track record of reliability for us to suggest this still-new technology for real-time control. It didn’t take long for our customers to get ahead of us and use it for control of low-criticality loops anyway because they saw the value very quickly. They weren’t disappointed.

Although wireless isn’t yet widely used for safety instrumented functions (SIFs), this doesn’t mean WirelessHART can’t be used in critical ways to make plants safer. Pursuing two of these possibilities is the topic of my article in Hydrocarbon Engineering. The article looks at personnel location awareness and toxic gas monitoring, with both systems using the same WirelessHART infrastructure as conventional process instrumentation. Let’s look at location awareness first. Most competing systems are built using Wi-Fi infrastructure, but this is very expensive.

Creating a location system using WirelessHART involves more than adding new process instruments to the network. The location triangulation functions operate with a different type of device called a location anchor. These communicate with each other and the WirelessHART gateways and access points similar to conventional WirelessHART instrument transmitters. Anchors communicate with the location tags that individual workers wear in the plant environment, and they provide the means to triangulate and determine where each tag/worker is located.

Emerson Location Awareness is supported by data processing software able to provide functions such as geofencing, mustering, and alerting of an emergency in progress. Using WirelessHART, even if it requires adding a few anchors in the plant or facility, is far less expensive than trying to achieve the same level of precision using Wi-Fi.

The second application is much more like adding conventional process instruments. WirelessHART toxic gas transmitters, such as Emerson’s Rosemount 928 Wireless Gas Monitor, can detect one of several target gases, depending on which Rosemount 628 Universal Gas Sensor module is mounted in the monitor. Its data can be displayed on a preconfigured dashboard to help operators in the plant and control room know there is a gas release in progress. Location awareness can show which workers might be in harm’s way and if they need to be moved to a safer area, and worker location can then be tracked using Location Awareness.

Extending the WirelessHART networks that you already have is an effective and economical way to extend protection for your people. Begin by thinking about where you are now. Do you know where your workers are in the plant, or do you still depend on walkie-talkies? Ditto for toxic gas emissions. Are peoples’ noses still the primary detection method?

Visit the Control & Safety System and Flame and Gas Detection pages at Emerson.com for more on technologies and solutions for safety strategies. You can also connect and interact with other engineers in the Oil & Gas and Chemical Groups at the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Automating Procedures in Ethylene Furnaces can bring Huge Benefits

Jim Cahill — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:32:38 GMT

There are many examples in plants where operators need to follow a particular procedure to safely transition the plant to a new condition. In an ethylene plant, furnace startup, decoke and shutdown operations are classic examples where following strict operating procedures is critical to prevent unsafe conditions as well as promote efficient operations. Since furnaces are decoked every 30-60 days depending on feedstock and severity, transitions happen relatively frequently.

Quite often we find different shifts execute the transitions differently. Many times, written procedures are either out-of-date or incomplete. Operators are also dealing with many other distractions in a control room environment, so frequently transitions take longer than they should.

These situations lend themselves to automating standard operating procedures in the DCS using state-based control (SBC). State-based control refers to the concept of operating a process in a number of different “states”.

For example, an ethylene furnace may have states such as Shutdown, Startup, Operating, Decoke, Safe Park, and so on. Each state has its own set of alarm settings, interlocks, overrides, controller states and setpoints. And there are defined procedures and sequences to transition from one state to another, often with manual operator steps required.

Procedure automation starts with a Discovery Study where the team identifies SBC opportunities and understands which processes are most likely to benefit from automating. As part of the process, Emerson consultants and plant staff review best practices and capture the knowledge of the key shift operators.

This project team identifies any new instrumentation, valve automation, pump starts, etc. that will be needed. Not every step in the process needs to be automated. Transition procedures may have several Hold points which require operator confirmation that a manual step has been completed.

Documentation from the Discovery Study is translated into requirements and used to design the structure and functionality to be delivered. The plant’s distributed control system (DCS) is used to implement the sequences. Depending on the age of the system, additional software may be needed to handle the settings and sequence function logic needed for transitioning between different states.

Benefits for implementing SBC on ethylene furnaces can be substantial. Shaving just 4 hours off of a decoke cycle for a furnace with a 60-day run length is worth a full day of production over the year. And 4 hours is relatively conservative. Automating startup of a vinyl acetate monomer plant increased annual capacity by 1.5% and enabled a 60% drop in operator interactions.

In a past project for an ethylene furnace, the automated system was able to save 1/3 of the time from start-of-decoke to furnace on-line again. Additional production from this lost operating time was worth millions annually. For furnace-limited ethylene plants, this should be a no-brainer!

Visit the Ethylene Solutions section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies and solutions to drive improved business performance.

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Improving Refinery Emissions Management

Jim Cahill — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 18:29:48 GMT

Controlling emissions is one of the great challenges for the energy-intensive refining industry. However, it is imperative because meeting increasing environmental regulations globally is a key concern.

In a Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance article, Control emissions to meet changing regulations, Emerson’s Ed Schodowski highlights ways technology can help minimize emissions while driving lower energy costs and reducing exposure to regulatory fines.

Ed notes that:

…top performers in the industry who strategically invest in their energy and emissions performance can achieve a competitive advantage with lower energy costs and less risk of fines. And those fines can be hefty.

He cites an example where refiners can develop:

…a strong flare management plan by employing wireless pressure relief valves (PRV) monitoring solutions that can quickly identify the source of release in your flare system, as well as deliver information needed for compliance.

Also for the flare system:

…efficient gas analyzer technologies that add a fast, 1-minute BTU measurement for precise control of flares, enable refineries to easily comply with new regulations that tighten monitoring frequency of flare vent gas components.

Read the article for more examples on ways to continuously monitor vent valves and pressure relief valves to help meet environmental regulations and protect your people, community and reputation.

Visit the Refiner’s Guide to Digital Transformation and Top Quartile Performance section on Emerson.com to download the full guide and for other articles on ways to drive improved operational performance. You can also connect and interact with other refining industry experts in the Refining group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Multiple Systems Working Together Prevent Tank Overfill Disasters

Jim Cahill — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 16:31:34 GMT

In Hydrocarbon Engineering’s Tanks & Terminals Supplement, Emerson’s Helena Hjortsberg looks at all the elements of a comprehensive overfill prevention system in her article, A Coordinated Strategy.

Overfilling a tank storing hydrocarbons or other flammable chemicals can cause an environmental incident under the best circumstances, but also a high probability of an explosion and fire. Given the costs in lost product, cleanup, equipment damage, and possibly human life connected with an incident, you’d think most facilities would have highly sophisticated overfill prevention systems.

Many facilities do have excellent systems and operate safely, but at some locations, the efforts can be surprisingly haphazard. Building a comprehensive protection system with elements able to support each other is the topic of my article in Hydro carbon Engineering’s Tanks & Terminals Supplement for Summer 2020. As it turns out, a lot has to go wrong to cause a major product release.

The most common source of releases, outside of a pipe or valve failure, is overfilling, as was the case in the incidents mentioned above. Such incidents happen when operators do not have an accurate indication of a tank’s contents and end up forcing in more liquid than it can hold. This stems from ineffective level instrumentation, resulting in poor situational awareness for the operators: the tank they are trying to fill is already fuller than they realize. This should be stopped by an automatic safety system able to shut down a liquid transfer, or at least trigger an alarm to warn operators of the developing situation.

Any one of those mechanisms should stop an incident. And if fuel does start running onto the ground, there should be flammable vapor and gas detection systems to sound an alarm before the fuel finds an ignition source, or to start a fire suppression system in the worst case.

Arguably, the first line of defense should be effective level gauges, and the best approach these days is radar, such as Emerson’s Rosemount 5900S Radar Level Gauge, which delivers ±0.5 mm (0.020 in.) instrument accuracy, reducing level measurement uncertainty to a minimum. The Rosemount 5900S takes overfill safety to a higher level with an innovative 2-in-1 feature which includes two radar gauges in one housing for independent level and overfill measurement. It is SIL 2 and SIL 3 certified according to IEC 61508 and enables API 2350 compliant solutions.

This capability needs to be part of a coordinated strategy with all the other elements of sensors and systems necessary to support this critical safety function. The article goes into more depth on all sides, so give it a full read. It covers a lot of material.

So which category does your facility land in? Comprehensive and coordinated, or haphazard? A lot could be riding on the answer. Visit the Tank Gauging System pages at Emerson.com for more info. Rosemount Tank Gauging Systems ensure accurate level, temperature, and pressure measurements for inventory control, oil movement, and overfill prevention to secure efficient operations. You can connect and interact with other design teams in the Refining and Chemical groups at the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Building Digital Transformation, One Step at a Time

Jim Cahill — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:54:01 GMT

In a Flow Control magazine article, Seven Digital Transformation Myths Exposed, Emerson’s Brian Joe offers advice on starting a digital transformation program.

When we talk to companies about digital transformation, especially companies that have yet to launch a program, we frequently hear two kinds of responses representing two extremes. Either they don’t think the technologies work, or they have inflated expectations of what the technology can deliver, well beyond what is practical. Many of those claims begin with a statement like, “I hear that digital transformation…” You can fill in the rest.

Many of these statements advanced are simply wrong, which prompted me to write an article for the June 2020 issue of Flow Control debunking seven myths of digital transformations that we hear again and again. You should read the article for all seven, but for right now, I’m going to concentrate on myth No. 6: Digital transformation is strictly top-down and must be implemented all at once. This often causes companies to do nothing because they think they can’t launch a big enough project to matter, but this is wrong thinking. The reality:

Projects can be launched on a small scale and driven from the plant level where challenges and pains are known by the personnel interacting with the process daily, with the knowledge of operations personnel informing digital transformation (DX) projects. Frontline personnel understand what specific challenges need to be addressed to drive performance improvements, bringing valuable perspective to these projects by informing them from the bottom-up.

For instance:

If pump failures are a routine problem, it is a simple matter to outfit a few of the most troublesome installations with condition monitoring instruments able to communicate via WirelessHART protocol. An analytics app designed for this type of application can collect and process the data and then provide recommendations for when repairs need to be made before an outright failure. This approach to DX — a series of small changes combined together to provide big results — takes advantage of the scalability of the technology. Each upgrade of this type is designed to solve an operational pain point or reduce an excessive cost.

You get the idea. Such condition monitoring instruments communicate with Emerson’s Plantweb Insight analytics software , which turn the raw data into information that can direct maintenance efforts so the things that really need attention can get it in a timely manner.

So where is your facility in your digital transformation journey? Are you stuck in your efforts to implement start your facility’s digital transformation because too many people believe the myths? The article can be a good starting point for a group discussion about direction and planning.

Visit the Digital Transformation pages at Emerson.com for more on technologies and solutions to create this reality. You can also connect and interact with other engineers in the IIoT & Digital Transformation Forum at the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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Building Lines of Defense Against Hydrocarbon Releases and Fires

Jim Cahill — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 03:30:52 GMT

In a Chemical Engineering article, Emerson’s Nick Pinto offers strategies for improving tank farm safety with more effective gas release and flame detection

In countless war movies, the heroes, whether in trenches or spaceships, have to stop the enemy advance at some particular point, providing the last line of defense to avoid disaster.

This may be overly dramatic, but designing an overall safety strategy for large-scale flammable liquid storage systems must consider multiple lines of defense, and how an incident can punch through them one by one if not impeded. A design team should analyze all the steps that might ultimately lead to a catastrophic fire and explosion, and how appropriate detectors can stop the advance.

That’s the topic of my article in Chemical Engineering. The first line of defense is always an effective process control system combined with a safety instrumented system, working together to keep flammable liquids and gases safely stored in the proper tanks. These should work automatically, virtually all the time. But things can go wrong, and when they do, an effective and proportional response is required.

If the situation is beyond what the SIS can deal with, a release of flammable liquid or gas might occur. Gas systems might also contain toxic gases, such as hydrogen sulfide, but for finished products, these have likely been removed already. Flammability is the more immediate concern. Gasoline spilling onto the ground becomes vapor and escaping propane is gaseous. Gas detectors look for these and other hazardous gases, hopefully before each finds an ignition source, and reports results. If fires do break out, flame detectors respond as quickly as possible so alarms can be activated, and so suppression systems can act appropriately.

So, the situations we’re concerned with here are after the first lines have failed, allowing liquids and gases to escape their normal containment—gasoline is running onto the ground, or a plume of propane is shooting into the air. How do we know those things are happening, and worse, how do we know when a fire has started?

We can “hear” a compressed gas, like propane, escaping by using Emerson’s Incus Ultrasonic Gas Leak Detector with its ultra-sensitive acoustic sensors.

We can “smell” a flammable gas or vapor by using Emerson’s Net Safety Millennium II SC310 Catalytic Bead Combustible Gas Sensor, which works with all flammable gas types and delivers % LEL detection quickly and reliably.

We can “see” a flammable gas by using Emerson’s Rosemount Open Path Gas detectors, which respond to critical wavelengths of light absorbed by hydrocarbon vapors.

If a fire actually breaks out, Emerson’s Rosemount 975MR Multi-Spectrum Infrared Flame Detector accurately captures and analyzes the multi-spectral signals produced by flames, even at long distances.

All these tools can work together to shore up critical lines of defense for any storage facility. What’s the situation where in your plant or facility? Are there enough detectors to allow your remediation actions to be proportional to the hazard, but still effective?

Visit the Flame and Gas Detection pages at Emerson.com for more on technologies and solutions for flammable gases and fires. You can also connect and interact with other engineers in the Chemical and Oil & Gas Groups at the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

The post Building Lines of Defense Against Hydrocarbon Releases and Fires appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.

This Week at the 2020 AFPM Summit

Jim Cahill — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 17:04:27 GMT

The 2020 American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) Summit starts today as a virtual conference. It is a learning event with in-depth sessions to share ways to improve plant performance.

From the agenda, I wanted to highlight some of the Emerson experts presenting this week. Tomorrow, August 26 at 1:30pm EDT, Meha Jha will present, Strengthening Your Career by Building Webs and Developing Spidey Senses. Meha:

…will cover tools, tips, and exercises for how to become the Spiderman of your career, from developing webs, or networks of people, to the career instincts needed to make strategic career decisions.

Also at this same time, Tim Olsen facilitates a session, Dynamic Real-Time Optimization for Value Sustainment: The Same Silos Are Not Going to Cut It. KBC Advanced Technologies’ Brian Burgio is the speaker and he will share how to gain:

…insight into the connectivity tools that will expand on the structural improvements that allow DCS raw data to be converted to value, through industry-leading reactor simulations, to rigorous modelling and finally to the applied advanced process control gain matrix.

Also on Wednesday at 3:30pm EDT, Julie Valentine joints other panelists from KBC Advanced Technologies and Chevron in a session, Improve Decision Making with Improved Mass Balance. This session’s focus is to gain:

…insight into measurement technologies, software and procedures for improving mass balance closure as well as operating company experience in justifying investments to improve the balance on either specific process units, or refinery-wide.

On Thursday, August 27 at 12:45pm EDT, Dr. Douglas White joins a panel facilitated by ARC Advisory Group’s Peter Reynolds. The panel includes experts from Marathon Petroleum and Sinclair Oil. They will provide case studies:

…from an operating company and solution provider perspectives on how to develop and execute a digital transformation program at your company.

Also on Thursday at 2pm EDT, Tim Olsen will also facilitate a panel featuring Pete Sharpe and an expert from Praxair, Digital Transformation: Case Studies on Developing Programs at Your Companies. They will review:

…new wireless sensors, the advances in predictive monitoring technologies of a cloud-based platform and its application to a facility.

Visit the 2020 AFPM Summit event page for more information and how to register for this virtual conference. You can also visit the Downstream Hydrocarbons section on Emerson.com for more on technologies and solutions to drive improved project and operational performance.

The post This Week at the 2020 AFPM Summit appeared first on the Emerson Automation Experts blog.