Pervasive sensing to feature at ACI Connect 2014

Jesse Dodge has been with Emerson Process Management since 2005, working initially for Rosemount Measurement in Minnesota. Over his time at Emerson he has been responsible for developing new products, including the Profibus PA and HART Revision 7 platforms. Jesse led the development of Emerson’s Pervasive Sensing initiative and is now in charge of marketing and planning for the Asia-Pacific region.

Dodge will speak at ACI Connect, Australia’s new engineering conference, to be held in Melbourne on 9 and 10 April.

In the past, instrumentation in the process industries has been limited directly to core process systems and safety systems. The cost of implementing instrumentation for non-core functionality was too high to justify. But with process plants now focusing more on non-process safety, asset reliability and energy efficiency as ways to reduce costs and increase profitability, more comprehensive sensing solutions are required. And to meet this need, exciting new sensing technologies are becoming available and are already being deployed by forward-looking process plants, according to Dodge.

“Our research at Emerson has shown that the existing traditional measurement market of around US $16 billion worldwide will more than double over the next 10 years, mainly due to the adoption of new sensing technologies that will have a significant impact on the bottom line for many plants,” explains Dodge. As part of his presentation, Dodge will be presenting examples of plants that are already taking advantage of some of these new technologies to already significantly improve their bottom line, as well as improving broader plant safety and reliability.

“A Minnesota-based refinery recently evaluated the cost of health monitoring for 110 critical pumps and found that, using traditional techniques, they would only be able to afford to monitor a handful of them,” he said. “Traditional asset health solutions have been designed for ultracritical assets such as turbines and therefore don’t meet the cost and installation needs required to monitor the health of 100+ critical pumps, heat exchangers and so on. But by utilising the latest in non-intrusive vibration sensing technology, coupled with a wireless infrastructure, this plant was actually able to monitor all 110 pumps within the same budget.

There are some exciting new sensor technologies now available that make detection of some events far safer and less intrusive than before.

“One example is the use of acoustics and ultrasonics to detect leaks, in which case the sensor doesn’t need to be directly and intrusively installed, but just strapped on a pipe or mounted nearby,” he explained.

“A Canadian pipeline company has recently invested in new ultrasonic gas leak detection technology for its propane terminals - being much more reliable than previous technologies, it was no longer necessary to enclose the wellhead to trap stray gases sufficiently for detection. Previously the requirement to enclose the gases resulted in a fire that caused significant burn injuries to an employee, and so this company was well disposed to try a technology that could successfully detect gas emissions in an open space - resulting in less installation overhead and greater safety.”

Dodge further explained that when deploying non-process sensing to save costs, it is important to make sure that the sheer number of new instruments does not introduce its own cost burden.

“More instruments can itself mean more maintenance and reliability costs,” he said. “This is why selecting the right sensing technology is important. For example, ultrasonic gas leak detectors and acoustic steam trap monitors are simply monitoring sound and therefore are ‘set-and-forget’ devices that don’t need regular calibration.”

But sensing is only a part of the solution. Today, it is more than just process operators that want process information. At a business level, it is important to have accurate and timely information to assist decision-making at a management level - and to assist with improvements in energy consumption, health and safety, and asset management. This means that it is not simply more raw data that is needed, but data presented as ‘actionable intelligence’ - which is where new software is becoming available to provide meaningful information to the people that need it, whether in the control room or office, or even on a mobile device.

I look forward to hearing Jesse’s presentation at ACI Connect 2014 to see where these new instrumentation, networking and software technologies will be taking plants in the future.