Remote, Automated Monitoring Keeps a Watchful Eye on Essential Assets 24/7
Automated monitoring of essential assets improves reliability and lowers maintenance costs. Remote monitoring takes automated asset monitoring to new levels by providing instantaneous notification of alerts and remote diagnosis support.
Nikki Bishop
PE, Senior Applications
Consultant for Emerson
Process Management
In recent years, the influx of communication technologies has enabled nearly instantaneous communication with virtually anyone located anywhere in the world. These technologies can also be applied to the plant floor to allow plant assets to communicate their status with plant personnel. Assets can now “talk” to the control room. Even further, assets can now alert the right person, right away when attention is necessary.
However, before jumping into a discussion on remote monitoring, it is necessary to discuss how to select the most effective asset monitoring strategy. A good automated monitoring strategy lays the foundation for a good remote monitoring infrastructure.
It’s no surprise that a good predictive maintenance strategy improves overall reliability and helps to meet production availability targets. However, not all predictive maintenance strategies are created equal. Predictive maintenance based on periodic – possibly infrequent – data acquisition fails to give real-time insight into asset health. Periodic data may come in the form of “clipboard rounds”, where personnel are sent into the field to manually collect data at some scheduled interval. This may occur once a shift, once a day or possibly less frequently.
This method provides only a snapshot of asset data and early warnings of impending problems may be missed. Even further, sending personnel out to the field for manual data collection might also mean putting them in a hazardous environment.
With little or no insight to know which assets actually need attention, resources may be wasted servicing assets that don’t need it, while missing assets that do. In fact, studies have shown that more than 60 % of a typical instrument technician’s trips to the field result in either no action or a minor configuration adjustment that could be done from their office.
Figure 1. Automated monitoring allows you to accurately and efficiently schedule repairs.
Figure 2. Essential assets are a class of assets that typically do not have monitoring systems in place already, but consequences can be high if a failure occurs.
Figure 3. Data collection alone is not sufficient for a monitoring strategy. A combinationof data collection, analysis, awareness and action is necessary for a successful program.
So What’s the Answer for a Solid Predictive Maintenance Strategy?
Automated monitoring provides online indication of an asset’s health and can even detect process conditions that may be unintentionally and unknowingly inducing a fault on equipment, allowing operators to make adjustments so that process related equipment faults can be avoided altogether. With advanced warning, maintenance staff can spend their time servicing assets that actually need it rather than wasting time searching for problems through manual inspection.
The assessed criticality of an asset often determines how an asset is managed. While real-time monitoring (and protection) of critical process equipment, such as large compressors or turbines, is standard practice at most facilities, on-line monitoring of second- tier equipment, such as pumps, heat exchangers, blowers, small compressors, cooling towers and air cooled heat exchangers (“fin-fans”) has traditionally been deemed cost-prohibitive or too difficult. Even though these unmonitored or manually monitored assets may not have been originally classified as “critical”, an outage or failure can cause a serious process disturbance or shutdown, resulting in process downtime and increased load on site personnel for repairs. These assets can be referred to as “essential assets”. Essential assets present an opportunity to add online monitoring solutions and improve overall reliability while lowering maintenance cost.
What Are the Components of a Successful Asset Monitoring Strategy?
Asset monitoring is not only about collecting data. Data collection simply lays the foundation for an asset monitoring strategy. Existing measurements can be used or new wireless measurements can be added easily. Once the measurement framework is in place, pre-engineered monitoring solutions are plug-and-play and take raw measurement data and transform it into meaningful alerts through analysis. Process and asset data can be aggregated to detect process conditions that may be inducing a fault on equipment. Adjustments to process conditions can be made so that process-related equipment faults can be avoided altogether.
Meaningful alerts generated by data analysis and aggregation are only useful if they are communicated to the right personnel at the right time. Providing awareness of the alerts is a critical component of an automated monitoring system. While there are a number of ways to provide awareness of alerts, the most effective method is through automatic notification. Alerts via text message or email ensure that the alert gets to the right person, right away.
Once the alert has been received, action must be taken by the person to resolve any issues. Remote access via tablet or smartphone allows for almost instantaneous diagnosis and action. If necessary, remote subject matter experts can be alerted and can log in remotely to help diagnose the problem. With an automated alert notification system in place, periodic reports can also be generated and distributed. These reports can include trends of asset health where asset degradation can be seen and action taken to prevent subsequent failure. Automated monitoring combined with automatically generated alerts and remote access capability provides a powerful means of monitoring asset performance.
Essential Asset and Remote Monitoring in Action
One site taking advantage of remote asset monitoring is the Separations Research Program at the University of Texas-Austin’s (UT) J.J Pickle Research Campus. The Separations Research Program at UT is a cooperative industry and university program that performs fundamental research of interest to chemical, biotechnological, petroleum refining, gas processing, pharmaceutical, and food companies. One current focus project is around carbon dioxide removal from stack gas. This process includes absorber and stripper columns and the associated assets such as pumps, blowers and heat exchangers. The process does not have redundancy in the assets so it is important to keep the assets wellmaintained and in operation. Losing one asset means the entire process is down until the repair is complete. In order to mitigate the risk of unplanned downtime, they have successfully implemented essential asset monitoring strategies for pumps, heat exchangers and blowers. They now have online insight into the health of their assets and can see when process conditions may be contributing to asset health degradation and make adjustments to prevent further damage or failure. For example, alerts for increasing vibration warn of impending failures and allow time for servicing before failure occurs.
Recognizing a need to communicate alerts to the proper personnel at the right time, UT has taken one step further by setting up a remote monitoring infrastructure. Alerts for conditions such as heat exchanger fouling, resonance speed detection, hydrocarbon leaks and pump cavitation can be automatically routed to site personnel as well as trained subject matter experts at the onset of the fault condition.
Besides monitoring process assets, the remote monitoring system, also known as iOps, monitors for control system health alerts such as an overloaded PC or failed backup controller. These alerts can be automatically routed via text message or email. The remote connection also allows experienced subject matter experts to log in using secure VPN access to help diagnose problems with assets and assist with the appropriate corrective action. With log in access via tablet or smart phone, diagnosis support is available instantaneously.
Having a remote monitoring infrastructure in place, customizable, periodic reports can be generated and automatically distributed. These reports contain trends of asset and system health and clearly identify which assets or systems require attention. The automated, remote system monitoring means that UT has trained subject matter experts armed and ready to take action when adverse conditions arise, whether it be a cavitating pump or an overloaded PC.
Figure 4. A wireless vibration transmitter installed on the pump provides valuable data for an automated pump monitoring solution, where pump health and status are clearly indicated.
Figure 5. Automated, remote system monitoring means that UT has trained subject matter experts armed and ready to take action when adverse conditions arise, whether it be an asset or control system component.
Figure 5 shows the remote monitoring process at UT. The plant and the control room with the operators in the control room are shown in the center. Essential asset monitoring strategies are implemented for pumps, heat exchangers and blowers and these monitoring solutions use field data to generate alerts and communicate those alerts to the control room. But what happens if the operator is not in the control room or not focused on the screen? Even if the control room operator is not present, the iOps center can monitor for any alerts 24/7 via the remote monitoring appliance installed. If there is an issue with the pump, such as cavitation, the essential asset monitoring solution will collect, aggregate and analyze the asset and process data. A meaningful alert and percent health value will be communicated to the remote monitoring appliance which transmits the alert to the iOps center which then can contact the local site representative as well as a remote subject matter expert, if necessary. The remote expert can log in to the site to help diagnose the problem and suggest corrective actions. The local site representative and remote expert collaborate on required actions and the UT operator can then carry out the corrective actions and fix the fault before it becomes a failure. This method ensures that the fault is not missed and that issues are resolved quickly and efficiently.
Using the latest developments in wireless and communications technologies, the era of on-line remote monitoring of plant assets is now a reality. Wireless technology makes it easy and cost-effective to add missing measurements for essential assets. Pre-engineered monitoring solutions are plug-and-play and provide an easy means of data aggregation and analysis. Remote monitoring and automated alerts ensure that alerts generated by monitoring solutions are not missed and that corrective action can be taken to prevent unplanned downtime due to a failed asset.
A Heat Pump Plant Turns the Carbon Footprint of Textile Fibre Production Negative
