I was in Europe at the end of last year meeting with many of our European subject matter experts. Two of whom were Emerson’s Ebru Yıldız and Maurizio De Francesco. They recently collaborated to share a great customer success story about the Poliport Kimya terminal in Turkey. The video, Emerson and Poliport Partnership, highlights the story of cooperation of Emerson Automation Solutions and Poliport in modernizing their process automation and terminal management. The video is in Turkish with English subtitles. Continue Reading ▶
Beer Pipeline and Coriolis Flow Measurement Technology
With the end of summer and the beginning of fall comes football season here in the U.S. And what better way to start the season than a good success story about quality beer production.
In a Flow Control Magazine article, Coriolis Meters Keep the Beer Flowing, Emerson’s Christian Grossenbacher shares how a Belgium brewery installs the world’s first beer pipeline with critical flow measurements to assure quality.
Christian opened highlighting a challenge this brewery faced:
A well-known and loved brewery, located in the center of historic Bruges for six generations, purchased a nearby bottling facility outside of town to meet increased production demands from soaring beer sales. However, they did not want to move the brewing facilities, nor did they want to transport beer in tankers through the busy town center, which would add to the traffic load on the old streets, as well as the expenses of either renting or owning the tankers, maintaining them and paying drivers.
A novel solution:
…the world’s first beer pipeline, was devised, but it required special equipment to make it work and keep the quality of the beer consistent. By installing underground piping that transported the beer from the brewery to the bottling plant 3.2 kilometers away, the transportation issue was solved.
Critical for this pipeline was a: Continue Reading ▶
Internet of Things Documentation and Devices
One really good podcast and website about all things “Internet of Things” is Stacey Higginbotham’s Stacey on IoT. In a post, There are 3 different versions of the IoT, she highlights the three versions, consumer IoT, enterprise IoT, and industrial IoT. We spend quite a bit of time on the third one, IIoT.
From this post, she received several responses:
…ranging from thoughtful insights into the security implications of how I tried to break down each type to calls for even more categories.
In a follow up newsletter (link to email subscription), Stacey shared some of this feedback including some from Emerson’s Michael Lester and Mike Boudreaux. In the post, Stacey highlighted the importance of documentation in enterprise IoT. Michael shared:
I agree with your comments and will add this is evolving beyond documentation methods of the past and more toward the need for automated versions of device management that include audit trail and configuration management capabilities to ensure changes to the enterprise environment are quickly identified and assessed for risk. Larger enterprises will need to employ such automated tools to manage the associated cyber and operational risks. Provisioning and de-provisioning and lifecycle management of anything connected to your network are key to scalability and successful integration.
About Industrial IoT, Stacey wrote: Continue Reading ▶
Wirelessly Monitoring Tank Thief Hatches to Avoid Regulatory Fines
I shared a great case study from the oil patch yesterday with time savings with wireless pressure monitoring at the well head. Today, let’s continue with another great case study from the oil patch with a Control magazine article, Use wireless to monitor thief hatches.
The article’s author opens describing what a thief hatch is. These devices are:
…installed on the top of low-pressure and atmospheric tanks in the oil & gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, biogas, water treatment and other industries to allow access to the tank. They can be used to take samples of the tank’s contents and determine the level of the tank, and they protect the tank from overpressure and excessive vacuum.
When an overpressure or excessive vacuum event occurs:
…the hinged hatch cover will break its seal, lift and allow the pressure to escape to the atmosphere. When the pressure or vacuum is reduced to the setpoint, the seal is reseated by either spring, sealing the tank.
The challenge which may lead to regulatory fines? Continue Reading ▶
Wireless Measurements for Increased Well Workover Productivity
ScienceDirect defines an oil and gas well workover as:
…any kind of oil and gas well intervention involving invasive techniques, such as wireline, coiled tubing, or snubbing. It is an expensive process of pulling and replacing a well completion to repair an existing production well for the purpose of restoring, prolonging, or enhancing the production of hydrocarbons.
An instrumentation & electrical foreman with an oil & gas producer shares his story well workover productivity gains in an Oil & Gas Engineering article, Wireless monitoring saves hours on each well workover. Continue Reading ▶
