Back in March in a post, Safety System Considerations for Process Fired Heaters, I shared some thoughts from a presentation by Emerson's Nikki Bishop and David Sheppard. The good news is that their thoughts are now available in a PTQ article, Role of fired heater...
refining
Custody Transfer Risk Assessment
It is one thing to transfer ownership between seller and buyer when the item sold comes in discrete units. It's another when it is a free-flowing fluid through pipes. In the process industries, this ownership transfer is known as custody transfer. Wikipedia defines...
Adding Missing Measurements in Refineries
We're now about six weeks away from the September 30-Oct 4 Emerson Exchange conference in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area. In fact, today, August 15, 2013 is the deadline for Early Bird registration—so if you were considering joining us, you'll want to act today for...
Valve Actuators for Reliable Delayed Coker Operations
Many of the units in a refinery operate under harsh conditions. Perhaps one of the harshest is the delayed coker unit. At the time of writing this post, Wikipedia defines this unit: A delayed coker is a type of coker whose process consists of heating a residual oil...
Fired Heater Safety Standards and Burner Management
In an earlier post, Safety System Considerations for Process Fired Heaters, I highlighted an American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) paper by Emerson's Nikki Bishop and Dave Sheppard. In this post, I'll share the safety system design, selection and...
Safety System Considerations for Process Fired Heaters
The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) will hold their 2013 annual meeting next week, just down the road from here in San Antonio Texas. This March 17-19 conference assembles key executives, decision-makers, and technical experts from refining...
Steps to Effective PID Loop Tuning
Sometimes when you read an article about tuning proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loops, you're treated to all the 2nd order differential equations they contain. These can be intimidating, especially if your college calculus classes are many years in the rearview...
Improving Refinery Operations through Technology
For producers of commodity products, profitability primarily comes from operational excellence—that is optimizing costs to run the process as efficiently as possible. In the U.K-based PTQ article, Refinery operations gain from advances in digital automation, Emerson's...
Addressing the Renewable Fuel Standard and Blend Wall
Federal, state, and local regulations keep changing and impact process manufacturers' operations. Emerson's Patrick Truesdale provided an update on the US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) at a past American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers conference (formerly...
American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Q and A and Technology Forum
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (formerly NPRA) are holding a Q&A and Technology Forum October 1-3, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Emerson's Tim Olsen, whom you may recall from earlier refinery-related posts, shared with me that several Emerson folks...
Start with the Pipe Racks and Branches for Your Wireless Communications Infrastructure
In refineries and petrochemical plants, pipe racks are the "backbones" of the process units. It is also the place Emerson's Gary Hawkins, a senior refining consultant, recommends should be completely covered with an IEC 62591 wireless device communications...
Large Capacity Coriolis Flow and Density Measurement
I saw a tweet about "return-flow-from-rig capabilities" from Oil, Gas & Petrochem Equipment (OG&PE) publisher and editor, J.B. Avants. He points to a video where he interviews Emerson's Denver Smart about applications for Micro Motion high-capacity Coriolis...
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