Over on the Emerson Process Experts Facebook page, I was asked if I could do something on the subject of alarms in control systems. Alarms are the visual and/or audio indications for plant operators identifying an abnormal condition (equipment problem, process...
abnormal situation management
Human Centered Design in Operator Displays
Emerson's Juan Carlos Bravo highlights the human centered design improvements in the DeltaV version 11 release. His focus in this 5-minute YouTube video is on the DeltaV operator displays. Much of the design comes from the research conducted with the Center for...
Diagnostic Opportunities in FCC Units
A reader who came upon one of the posts in the abnormal situation prevention category asked about ways early fault detection could reduce unplanned downtime in a refinery fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit. I turned to Emerson's Gary Hawkins, a consultant on the...
Start with Desired Operator Actions in Alarm Strategy Development
Let's close this week with another great question and a great answer, this time involving operator alarm strategy development. A paraphrased version of the question was: I am planning to implement the on-delay / off-delay and deadband alarm parameters. Is there a...
Healthy Pumps, Healthy Hearts
OK, I confess to being an engineer in my core when I was explaining to my son the other day how the heart is a reciprocating pump. The systolic and diastolic pressures are the high and low-pressure peaks based on the heart's expansion/contraction cycle. Blood pressure...
Diagnosing Valve Performance Issues
My good friend Riyaz Ali, whom you may recall from earlier process safety and digital valve controller-related posts, was kind enough to send me an article he's recently written. The subject is performance diagnostics for control valves. Since control valves are in...
Control Valves in Process Uptime
OK, the folks in Emerson's Fisher valve division get pretty excited about control valves, but do you? Control valves, after all, have been around for a while: The concept of a control valve goes at least as far back as the bronze plug cocks used by the Romans in their...
Shifting from Time-Based to Condition-Based Maintenance
You may recall Emerson's Bill Zhou from his demo video pieces here on the blog. I told him to be on the lookout for unscrupulous talent agents who'll want to whisk him away to Hollywood. Bill pointed me to a HART Communications Foundation announcement of Mitsubishi...
Applying Automation Advances in Refineries
Update and bump: Tim just let me know that he's been elected to the position of 2nd Vice Chair for the AIChE Fuels & Petrochemicals Division (FPD). As described below, he'll serve a four-year term including one year as division president. Congratulations, Tim!...
Pressure, Flow, Level Diagnostics in High Definition
Let's close this week with a new era for us in YouTube-based demonstration videos. The team has just added three new videos produced in high definition (HD) video format. The videos include: If you click through and see the videos in HD on the YouTube site, what makes...
Collect, Analyze, Decide, and Act on Critical Measurements
Emerson's Bill Zhou is in town this week, escaping the cold north of Minnesota. You may recall Bill, from his Emerson Exchange plugged impulse line video demonstration. Actually, his purpose was not to see the Austin wildflowers in full bloom, but to work with the...
Better Operational Decisions from a Safety Viewpoint
Recently at the International Health, Safety, Environment, and Loss Prevention Conference in Kuwait, Emerson's David Walker had the opportunity to present on the topic of process safety. His presentation, Using a Smart Safety Instrumented System (SIS) to Make Better...
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