The distillation process is one of the most common means of separating two or more components from a fluid. Ever handy Wikipedia defines it: Distillation is a method of separating mixtures based on differences in volatilities of components in a boiling liquid mixture....
abnormal situation management
Detecting Valve Seat Leaks
The devices that touch your process such as control valves, measurement instrumentation, and analyzers have tremendous impact on the ability to control the process efficiently. Even the best control and advanced control strategies can't do what they are designed to do...
Are Human-Technology Interactions Solving or Causing Problems? Part 1
Process automation engineers' decisions impact everything from project cost and schedule, to uptime, throughput, quality, and safety. Instruments and valves connect the physics and chemistry of your process, and the decisions made by your automation systems and...
Continuously Diagnosing the Instrumentation Electrical Loop
My friends in Chanhassen have been hard at work on the usability front. I connected with Emerson's Alexander Miller to find out what's the latest with the Rosemount 3051 pressure transmitter. Alex pointed to two new innovative features — Local Operator Interface (LOI)...
Safety Instrumented System Diagnostics to Prevent, Not Initiate Safety Trips
Emerson's Mike Boudreaux pointed me to a great blog post by exida's Principal Partner, Dr. William Goble. The post, I Don't Want No D*** Diagnostics! describes how automatic diagnostics in a safety-rated transmitter led to a false trip, much to the displeasure of the...
Sharing Devices between Control and Safety Instrumented Systems
Emerson's Mike Boudreaux alerted me to a discussion in the Oil and Gas Instrumentation Club LinkedIn group. The thread referenced an earlier post on this blog, Field Device Sharing Between Control and Safety Systems that Mike had written. Mike quoted Emerson certified...
Building an Effective Alarm Management Program
ChemicalProcessing.com has a great article on how to more effectively manage plant alarms. The article, Make Some Alarming Moves—Tackle distractions that impair operator performance and process efficiency, by exida consulting's Todd Stauffer and Emerson's Kim VanCamp,...
Improving Plant Operation through Better Alarm Management
At the ARC Industry Forum this week in Orlando, Ergon's Steve Elwart shared how they have taken a systematic approach in managing alarms at the refinery to reduce unplanned downtime, avoid equipment failure, and improve operator performance. He opened with an incident...
Fault Tolerance and Mitigating Risk
You may hear the words internal faults, external faults, redundancy, availability, and reliability tossed about in discussions about control system architectures. Emerson's Dave Denison, a software engineering manager in the DeltaV technology organization, wrote a...
Operator Performance Research Put into Practice
This week, the Center of Operator Performance (COP) is meeting here in Austin, Texas. I have the opportunity to listen in, and share a few observations with you. You can follow these on my Twitter posts tagged #COPmtg. For those not familiar with the work of this...
Simplifying Access to Abnormal Condition Detection Diagnostics
I'm always in the hunt for stories to tell, and had a chance hallway meeting with Emerson's Tom Wallace when he was in town a few weeks back. You may recall Tom from some of our posts on HART, Foundation fieldbus, EDDL, and FDT. Some of these posts generated quite a...
Economic, Environmental and Safety Implications in Alarm Management
Managing the alarms in a process manufacturing plant is typically a large part of a plant operator's day. As process complexity has increased, the control system operator interface technologies have also had to improve to better communicate the abnormal conditions,...
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