Following an accidental fire at the IOCL Jaipur Terminal, an extensive review of safety measures recommended by the MB Lal Committee has resulted in the introduction of failsafe actuators for critical tank farm applications. These valves, known as ROSOV (Remote Operated Shut-off Valves), now provide tank overfill protection at the majority of storage facilities owned by the Indian oil industry.

The application required the valves to be electrically operated, spring-return failsafe with SIL2 functional safety certification for use in hazardous areas. During the two-year specification writing period, Rotork worked closely with the three main oil companies in India, providing live product presentations, technical advice and performance reports, leading to the selection of Rotork Skilmatic SI/EH electro-hydraulic actuators operating triple-offset butterfly valves as the standard for the critical ROSOV application.

The Rotork Skilmatic self-contained electro-hydraulic valve actuator combines all-electric simplicity with the precision of hydraulic actuation and the reliability of spring-return failsafe operation. Standard Skilmatic features include non-intrusive setting, performance monitoring and configurable data logging of valve and process data for analysis, preventative maintenance and asset management.

To-date, over 1600 Skilmatic actuators have been supplied through Indian valvemakers. All actuators are certified explosionproof to Exd llB T4 with CCoE (Chief Controller of Explosives) approval and SIL2 functional safety system certification. For this application actuators are supplied with dual Modbus fieldbus communications and separate local controls mounted outside the tank bung with a local ESD (Emergency Shut Down) pushbutton.

Along with the above, Rotork was also selected to supply 4000 CP/GP spring return pneumatic actuators to various valvemakers for tank farm applications. Rotork therefore took the lead as the single vendor for failsafe actuators on triple-offset butterfly valves on all tank farm applications.

South Korea’s petrochemical company is located in the town of Yeosu. The plant started from 350,000 tons of ethylene per year production and expanded to 1,000,000 tons per year now. There are twelve naphtha cracking furnaces in this plant. The naphtha used as the feedstock for this plant is fed to a pyrolysis (steam cracking) furnace, where it is combined with steam and heated to 980 to 1,080° C. Within this temperature range, the feedstock molecules "crack" to produce ethylene as well as methane, hydrogen, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, xylene, and other co-products. After the pyrolysis reaction is quenched, the rest of the plant separates the desired products into streams that meet the various product specifications. The process steps include distillation, compression, process gas drying, hydrogenation (of acetylenes), and heat transfer.

All of the processes at this ethylene plant are controlled by a Yokogawa CENTUM CS 3000 production control system that was engineered, installed, and commissioned by Yokogawa Korea. To further enhance operations at this plant, Yokogawa Korea introduced the Exapilot operation efficiency improvement package in 2006.

Download Full Story

The branch of the largest professional education complex in Latin America, Servico Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial (SENAI), in Portuguese language for National Service for Industrial Training, provides students with a unique opportunity of learning and gaining practical experience on an actual process with their Yokogawa instrumented micro plants. "Yokogawa is not just providing the products, but also providing all the necessary training and knowledge", said, Mr. Jean Barbosa Cavalcante, the leader of CIITEC, Centro de Inspiracao e Inovacao Tecnologica in Portuguese for Technical Innovation and Inspiration Center from SENAI-AL.

SENAI, a non-profit educational institution in Brazil, provides the research, training, and education for engineers in various industrial areas such as sugar based energy, oil and gas, automobile, and more. Funded in the 1940s by National Confederation of Industry Systems (CNI) and Federation of Industries of the States, it is now the largest professional education complex in Latin America supporting 28 industrial areas and offering approximately 3,000 courses.

SENAI-Al, a branch of SENAI located in capital city Maceio in Alagoas state, provides the research, calibration and inspection work to Alagoas industry. Through those services, SENAI-AL manufactures scaled down versions of actual plants - called micro plants. Thanks to micro plant, students can experience an actual process in the same way they would in a real plant. For students, this is a practical and effective way to augment learning because they "see and feel" the actual process, which is something they cannot experience by using process simulation alone. The first micro plant is an Ethanol distillery plant, which is one of main industries in Maceio.

Since 2008, Yokogawa America do Sul Ltda has worked together with SENAI-AL for instrumentation of micro plants by providing not just the Yokogawa’s transmitters, flow meters, and PLCs, but also helping them in training. SENAI-AL now delivers micro plants to other universities and research institutes all over Brazil for the purpose of education and research. With the ethanol distillery micro plants, students are learning hands-on temperature, pressure, level and flow measurement as well as feedback control.

SENAI-AL selected Yokogawa to provide the training kits because of the long-term stability and low maintenance requirements of its instruments as well as for Yokogawa’s ability to provide basic process knowledge training, and additional digital technologies. In addition, Yokogawa provides consistent service from field instruments to system with SENAI-AL. The micro plants are contributing to increase the number and competency level of IA engineers all over Brazil.

Manufacturers in both the process and discrete manufacturing industries should consider condition monitoring (CM) for critical assets to improve the effectiveness of their maintenance resources. Typical benefits include improved uptime, asset longevity, cost control, yield/quality and safety. A study by a major petroleum company showed that, compared to calendar-based preventive maintenance, predictive reduces maintenance costs by 50 percent. This paper discusses the advantages of packaged predictive maintenance (PdM) applications to leverage existing process and smart device data. White Paper by Schneider Electric / ARC