Building Competency through Operator Training Systems

by | Dec 10, 2012 | Control & Safety Systems, Services, Consulting & Training, Simulation

Jim Cahill

Jim Cahill

Chief Blogger, Social Marketing Leader

Automation technologies can help in making plants more efficient, but only if the operations and maintenance personnel understand how to make effective use of these technologies. For control systems, Operator Training simulators (OTS) are one way to develop knowledge of the process and the system and provide exposure to abnormal situations.

Emerson’s Ronnie Bains, the European OTS & Dynamic Simulation Consultant, shared a story with me applying operating training systems at Rompetrol in the largest refinery in Romania. The refinery, located on the Black Sea, receives crude oil via oil tankers and via its pipeline network. The transportation costs associated with these imports meant that the refinery needed to operate as efficiently as possible throughout its supply chain.

Rompetrol sought to improve the operating knowledge and experience of their operations and maintenance personnel. They sought an OTS to simulate abnormal situations, to improve recognition and response, startup and shutdown conditions, and basic knowledge of how the process operates including its ranges of operation. Testing with associated grading of personnel, helped demonstrate improved competency.

Ronnie and the Emerson project team employed a standardized implementation approach—Standard Entities for the Engineering of Dynamic Simulators (SEEDS). The SEEDS solution consists of a library of native DeltaV simulation objects, which enable the development of a medium fidelity dynamic simulation.

Fidelity is a common term used in simulation to describe the rigor/complexity of process models. The medium fidelity model uses a mass and heat balance of the process within the model. The model will run automatically and will respond to operator and system actions as per the actual process behavior. The model includes process dead time, accumulation, integration functionality and is based upon first principles.

The DeltaV OTS included this process specific simulation for the Mild Hydrocracker Unit, a copy of the refinery’s actual DeltaV configuration and DeltaV Simulate software. The training solution included initial conditions, a series of timed action scenarios that simulate normal and abnormal conditions in the process, equipment and system simulated malfunctions and field operator devices.

This was the first DeltaV OTS developed for Rompetrol and the refinery staff acknowledged its success. It highlights the improvements, which a DeltaV SEEDS OTS can provide to process manufacturers.

Popular Posts

Comments

Follow Us

We invite you to follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to stay up to date on the latest news, events and innovations that will help you face and solve your toughest challenges.

Do you want to reuse or translate content?

Just post a link to the entry and send us a quick note so we can share your work. Thank you very much.

Our Global Community

Emerson Exchange 365

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the authors. Content published here is not read or approved by Emerson before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Emerson.

PHP Code Snippets Powered By : XYZScripts.com