The New Instrument Department

Building of shared road networks, railroad networks, network of canals, telephone network, and the Internet - for transportation of people, goods, and information enable societies to grow and prosper benefitting all just like the vascular system in plants and animals transport water and oxygen allowing them to grow and thrive. So what can the instrument department do to make their plant prosper? Here are my personal thoughts:

Maintenance, reliability, and integrity departments are challenged to extend the period between turnarounds and parts replacement while at the same time reduce maintenance cost and improving availability by moving as much as possible from periodic preventive maintenance to condition-based maintenance. The energy efficiency team is challenged to reduce energy consumption, losses, and carbon emissions. The HS&E department is challenged to reduce incidents, shorten incident response time, reduce emissions, and ensure compliance with an increasing number of regulatory requirements. Operations are challenged to improve productivity. Moreover, personnel may be limited.

Automation can help achieve these goals. For instance, maintenance, reliability, and integrity are helped greatly by using automatic data collection and analysis instead of infrequent manual data collection. Energy efficiency and loss control is helped greatly by monitoring energy consumption with finer granularity. HS&E is improved with better situational awareness. Operations productivity too is helped by automating manual data collection. All these departments and more can benefit from a common shared wireless sensor network infrastructure.

This is where I personally believe the instrument department in all plants should step up and deploy a plant-wide WirelessHART sensor network. This is not about IT networks. This is a renaissance for the instrument department, the new digital instrument department. WirelessHART has proven itself for many years and many plants have already deployed wireless sensors. With this experience plants are now ready to expand with plant-wide infrastructure. The wireless sensor network is best handled by the instrument department precisely because it is shared infrastructure benefitting all the other departments. Indeed only some of the data goes into the control system. Most of the data goes into the plant historian and the asset management system (AMS).

Several new plants including floating vessels are already being built with plant-wide WirelessHART infrastructure. That is, a WirelessHART gateway can be found in each plant unit providing a wireless sensor network for that plant unit. Existing plants are being modernized by deploying WirelessHART networks. Because WirelessHART is a full-mesh topology where every device is a router and messages can be relayed in 7 hops or more, backbone routers and backbone networks are not required. This makes WirelessHART very easy to deploy in a running plant. Note that WirelessHART is not taking the place of the control system. This is a second layer of automation over and above the primary layer of automation. Plants can be modernized with plant-wide WirelessHART infrastructure without replacing the historian, AMS, or control system.

Once the plant-wide WirelessHART network is in place, each department can start to take advantage of this infrastructure by deploying sensors as at will to meet new requirements in their respective areas of responsibility. Existing software such as the historian or HMI can be used, but specialized software for condition monitoring and energy management etc. are also available to turn raw data into actionable information. See further explanation of these applications in this article: Instrumental to Success

https://www.ceasiamag.com/2015/04/instrumental-to-success/11137/

Deploying a plant-wide WirelessHART sensor network will have the same impact on a plant as deploying roads, railroads, canals, and phone lines has had on nations. The new instrument department can take the lead in transforming how the plant operates going forward. This is also a step in the direction of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrie 4.0 – the fourth industrial revolution. Every instrument manager which has not already done so should take a close look at their wireless sensor network readiness. Well, that’s my personal opinion. If you are interested in how the digital ecosystem is transforming process automation click “Follow” by my photo. Let me know what you think of this essay by providing your feedback below, and click “Like” if you found this useful.