The 2012 EMEA Honeywell Users’ Group held in Istanbul, Turkey late last year heard Ignace Verhamme’s overview of Honeywell’s Experion PKS Orion, a new ‘universal’ control system that is claimed to replace plethoric legacy IO systems. Orion offers enhanced operator displays, alarm management, processing and engineering efficiency. On the IT side, virtualization is the name of the game as was explained by Paul Hodge.
Virtualized system engineering is recommended for new builds or major retrofits where it reduces computer infrastructure and improves project ‘agility’. Virtualization allows designers to separate functional design from physical deployment. Virtual field acceptance testing on an onshore staging in the data center allows design freeze dates to be extended. This impacts hardware procurement as final equipment is not required until late in the project cycle when its specifications are well established. On site, virtualization and thin client operator workstations reduce the hardware footprint and energy requirements. High availability, fault tolerant blade servers can be reconfigured from engineering design templates to provision additional virtual machines on demand. Already, over half of Honeywell’s major clients are virtualizing and an estimated 75% of all servers will be virtualized by 2014.
Richard Siereveld’s presentation on terminal automation highlighted use cases in Saudi Aramco and ConocoPhillips. He argued against the supplier fragmentation that typifies many major terminals. Multiple vendors make for multiple ‘point solutions’ and, ‘point solutions are pointless.’ Using Honeywell as the main automation contractor, ConocoPhillips reported safer, more efficient operations with a tenfold improvement in a batching KPI. For Aramco, Experion KPS enabled a new loading system along with SAP integration to be deployed in record time.
Andy Coward’s case history of Holly Frontier’s Navajo refinery described how a long-established ‘mandraulic’ control by experienced operators was incapable of adapting to new processes. As time went on, more and more loops were stuck in manual mode and safety incidents were rising. Navajo decided to implement a regulatory control improvement program using Honeywell as MAC. This required fixing a lot of out-of-spec equipment before implementing a very successful loop tuning program with OpeTune. This has resulted in much more stable loop performance, better refinery throughput and environmental compliance. Read the HUG presentations.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.