Control System World

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that it will be releasing an enhanced version of the ProSafe®-RS safety instrumented system (SIS) on November 27. This new version, R4.01, features an exciting expansion of Yokogawa's lineup of I/O devices and introduces crucial new SIS components. In addition, the FieldMate™ Validator software has been enhanced to work with this latest version of ProSafe-RS.

In the oil, natural gas, petrochemical, iron & steel, and other energy and basic materials industries, accident prevention and protection of the environment are paramount concerns in plant operations. Accordingly, there is a growing demand for SISs that can detect abnormal conditions and safely initiate emergency shutdowns.

To keep pace with the ever evolving business and technology landscape and respond to customers' needs for solutions that will deliver maximum return on assets and minimize total cost of ownership, Yokogawa has continued to strengthen the functions of the ProSafe-RS SIS. With R4.01, plant operators can be assured of an optimum engineering environment that spans the entire plant lifecycle, from plant design and the engineering and installation of systems and devices to the start-up of production, maintenance, and renovation.

New Features added:

• N-IO (Network I/O) field I/O device with smart configurable I/O that can handle multiple types of I/O signals
• FieldMate Validator software tool for use with field I/O instruments to check field device wiring and verify that devices are operating correctly
• Automation Design Suite (AD Suite) integrated engineering environment

Many manufacturers segment business-system networks from plantwide networks by using an industrial demilitarized zone (IDMZ). But once segmented, how is data from industrial automation and control systems (IACS) securely shared across this buffer zone?

A new white paper from Cisco and Rockwell Automation, “Securely Traversing IACS Data Across the Industrial Demilitarized Zone,” provides guidance for successfully designing and deploying an IDMZ as part of a Converged Plantwide Ethernet architecture. This allows manufacturers to securely share IACS data from the plantwide network to the enterprise network. The paper explains key IDMZ assets that enable this secure data-sharing, which include application mirrors and remote desktop gateway services.

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Oman Liquefied Natural Gas LLC (OLNG) is a limited liability incorporated joint venture company established by a Royal Decree and operated under the laws of the Sultanate of Oman. It engages in the business of producing and selling liquefied natural gas (LNG) and byproduct natural gas liquids (NGL).

The Company undertakes, directly or indirectly, project operations and activities necessary to liquefy, store, transport and market Oman’s natural gas and to deliver LNG to customers in the global markets. The Company operates three liquefaction trains at its site in Qalhat near Sur with a capacity of 10.4 million tonnes per annum.

The produced gas at the Barik, Saih Nihayda and Saih Rawl gas fields are gathered at the Saih Rawl Plant - a gas field complex operated on behalf of the Government of Oman by Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) - in Oman’s interior. From there, a gas pipeline approximately 360 kilometres long and 48 inches in diameter with a gas capacity of 34 million cubic meters a day, is delivered to OLNG where the gas is liquefied.

The LNG production trains 1 and 2 located at the OLNG plant have been using Yokogawa CENTUM CS production control system (PCS) since 2000, and train 3 has been controlled by CENTUM CS since 2005. There have been no major issues in the process control systems over the course of these years.

With the discontinuation of the UNIX OS system, OLNG decided to take a phased approach to upgrade its systems from CENTUM CS to CENTUM VP for all liquefaction trains, a common facility upgrade involving other systems like Exaopc stations used for PI, APC (Exasmoc, Exarqe), and metering. Yokogawa’s eLogBook, an electronic logbook, is now an integral part of the OLNG day-to-day operations. Operator logging and handover applications are easily handled by this eLogBook. In addition, the central control room (CCR) renovation has been completed.

Moxa has announced the release of the MGate MB3660MGate_MB3660 series of high density Modbus gateways that convert between the Modbus TCP and Modbus RTU/ASCII protocols. The gateways can be accessed by up to 256 TCP master/client devices, or connect to 128 TCP slave/server devices simultaneously without decreasing performance. Each serial port can be connected with up to 31 serial devices. In addition, the MGate MB3660 gateways are designed with dual Ethernet interfaces and dual power modules for addressing redundancy concerns. This strong collection of benefits make the MGate MB3660 gateways a perfect fit for power monitoring, environmental monitoring, and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) in large-scale industrial applications.

“The main characteristic shared by these applications is that they are required to collect data from a large number of Modbus devices. The MGate MB3660 can actively communicate and collect data with end devices continuously to obtain up-to-date information; a SCADA system can retrieve all of the data from end devices in just 1 second. By using a high density Modbus gateway, you no longer need to use large numbers of low-port-density Modbus gateways, which come with the added burden of extra wiring and installing hardware and software one gateway at a time,” said Sean Chen, product manager of Moxa’s Industrial Ethernet Gateway division. “Moxa’s MGate MB3660 is designed with innovative command learning, which allows the gateways to actively and continuously retrieve data from Modbus devices in parallel through all serial ports; you won’t even need to key in one Modbus command, resulting in a dramatic reduction in the amount of time a Modbus device needs to wait to be accessed.”

The MGate MB3660 Modbus gateways support redundancy for both the power input and Ethernet connection, and come with dual AC or DC power inputs built in for power redundancy, and dual Ethernet ports (that support the same IP or different IPs) for network redundancy. In addition, the MGate MB3660 series isolation model provides 2 kV isolation protection suitable for power substation applications.

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Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces the release of Exaquantum™ R3.01. Compared to the previous version of the Exaquantum plant information management system, Exaquantum R3.01 delivers a six-fold increase in data acquisition performance and can handle five times as many data points (tags).

Plant operators seek to acquire temperature, pressure, and other types of data to better understand what is happening in their plants and obtain insights needed to improve equipment and operating procedures. In keeping with the industry "big data" trend of utilizing ever growing amounts of data, there is a rising need for information management solutions that can acquire more data points and have higher acquisition speeds.

To meet these requirements, Yokogawa has created Exaquantum R3.01. This latest version of Exaquantum delivers a quantum increase in the data acquisition speed and the number of tags that can be handled by a server, giving plant operators a much more detailed understanding of their plant processes. Positioning Exaquantum R3.01 as a data historian platform for acquiring and storing the plant data needed to improve plant operations, Yokogawa will utilize this product to create value with its customers and expand its solutions business.

Enhanced Features:

• Increased data acquisition speed
• Increased number of tags that can be handled
• Support for tablets
• Improved engineering tools

This white paper describes the distinction between failure rate prediction and estimation methods in general and then gives an overview of the procedures used to obtain dangerous failure rates for certain mechanical equipment using exida FMEDA predictions and OREDA estimations. exida frequently compares field failure rate data from various sources to FMEDA results in order to validate the FMEDA component library. However, because OREDA and FMEDA methods are quite different, it is not possible to compare their results directly. A methodology is presented which creates predictions and estimations that are more comparable. The methodology is then applied to specific equipment combinations and the results are compared. When differences in the results exist between the two methods, plausible explanations for the differences are provided.

The comparisons show that the OREDA failure rates are well within the range of the exida FMEDA results. The comparisons also show that, with two exceptions, the average FMEDA predictions for dangerous failure rates are only slightly less than those of the OREDA estimations. In those two exceptions, FMEDA predictions are higher than OREDA. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that, when compared in an “apples-to-apples” fashion, for the equipment analyzed in this paper, the exida FMEDA predictions and OREDA estimations are quite comparable.

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This project was conducted for PTT Aromatics and Refining Public Company Limited (PTTAR), which was established in September 2007 through the amalgamation of Aromatics (Thailand) Public Company Limited (ATC) and Rayong Refinery Public Company Limited (RRC) and was Thailand’s no.1 integrated oil refiner and aromatics producer. In October 2011, PTTAR was amalgamated with PTT Chemical Public Company Limited to form the current PTT Global Chemical Public Company Limited.

PTTAR’s AR1 crude oil refinery at the Map Ta Phut industrial estate in Rayong started operation in 1996 and was capable of converting 280,000 barrels per day. By 2006, after 10 years in use, the refinery’s original Foxboro IA Series (v4.3) distributed control system (DCS) was beginning to show its age. To decrease downtime and maintenance costs, the decision was made to replace it with a more modern control system.

In this modernization project, PTTAR chose to go with a Yokogawa control system solution and work with Yokogawa Engineering Asia as its main automation contractor (MAC). The main reasons for this decision were:

• Star Petroleum Refining’s refinery at the same industrial estate has had good results with a Yokogawa DCS that has been in operation there for 15 years.
• Yokogawa’s proven MAC project execution capability
• Yokogawa’s excellent local support
• Yokogawa’s experience in plant revamps involving migrations from industrial automation systems such as the Foxboro IA Series DCS
• Yokogawa’s knowledge of the process technologies that PTTAR had licensed from Shell

Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that Yokogawa Solution Service Corporation, a subsidiary that is responsible for Yokogawa's control business in Japan, has taken an order from Asahi Kasei Chemicals Corp. to provide a network healthiness check service that analyzes and verifies the integrity of the data traffic on the control system communications busses at its Mizushima Works. An industry first*, this cyber security service for control systems combines network visualization technology with the collection and analysis of data traffic.

As the threat of cyber-attacks has increased in recent years, there is an urgent need for strong security measures with control systems, particularly those used in critically important infrastructure such as electric power, gas, and petrochemical plants. With the increasing sophistication of such attacks, it is often no longer sufficient to rely solely on general security measures such as the use of antivirus software. Yokogawa's network healthiness check service is able to visualize the status of communications traffic on a network after periodically collecting and analyzing log data. When data traffic from an unknown IP address, communication via an unspecified protocol or port, data loss, or some other potential hazard is detected, Yokogawa will then work with the customer to identify possible causes and propose any necessary improvements. Unlike conventional services that rely on the monitoring and analysis of vast amounts of control system communications traffic, Yokogawa's service is able to quickly and intuitively visualize and grasp the status of the control system's communications traffic so that quick action can be taken in response to any potential issue. Yokogawa jointly developed this visualization technology with Yasuo Okabe, a professor at Kyoto University; Hiroki Takakura, formerly an associate professor at Kyoto University and currently a professor at the National Institute of Informatics; and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

Yokogawa develops and provides to its customers a variety of highly secure device and system solutions, and is also engaged in the provision of ongoing operational support services. The company will continue to assist its customers through the provision of control system cyber security solutions.