September
2011
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© Copyright 2011
BDP Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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| Operations
Insights:
Plant
Historian provides insight on
plant performance
Plant Historians are
normally a low priority concern
for process operations, except
when regulatory reporting
requirements make the Historian a
vital asset in the “stay in
business” category. But the
Historian also enables collection
of high-resolution process data
for plant performance diagnostics
when experiencing operating
problems. A Plant Historian may
also be used to collect and store
process data from multiple plant
assets or multiple control system
platforms, providing users a
broader view of plant performance
data which may then be visualized
using consolidated reports,
multi-pen trend displays, or data
analysis spreadsheets.
Many HMI programs
used to operate midstream assets
include a basic
“logger” application
for trending, loop tuning, and
production reporting. But
many of these short duration
Historian applications are
limited by the capacity or
capability of the operator
workstation hardware.
Stand-alone Historians that
provide long-term data storage
and retrieval capability are
typically installed on a more
robust SQL Server based
workstation, with multiple hard
drives for redundancy, and
typically with multi-user access
to support concurrent data
requests from operations,
engineering, and management
personnel. Plant Historians
may be used to archive production
data, product specs, operator
setpoints, alarm limits and
events, and environmental
monitoring data. Therefore,
plant Historians provide a
reliable data source for daily
production reports, material
balance reports, alarm management
statistics, predictive
maintenance reports, as well as
source data for process modeling
to evaluate plant
performance.
Plant Historians
typically include mathematical
tools to perform statistics and
reduce collected data to
time-based averages for reporting
purposes; and Historians also
include data compression
algorithms to minimize hard drive
consumption. However, when
using historical data to develop
plant models, it is important to
use “raw” process data
that is not skewed or biased by
Historian data compression
settings. Adjustments to
the Historian filtering dead
bands or compression algorithms
may be necessary to collect raw
process data required for
analysis and regression to
develop accurate process
models. These Historian
settings can typically be
adjusted on a tag basis for
individual process values.
Many Historians
available today include smaller
applications installed at each
processing plant to collect data
from control system equipment for
local operations use, with
store-and-forward capability to
transfer data to a larger
Historian that serves as the
corporate repository for all
processing plants. These
distributed Historian
applications provide secure data
collection across a corporate
WAN, where network interrupts
typically do not affect data
collection integrity at the
processing plants. Using
remote login techniques to access
the local or corporate Historian
can also act as a force
multiplier for responsible
resources in operations,
maintenance, engineering, and
management staff.
The BDP Inc. team
provides engineering services to
deploy plant Historians, to
develop trending and reporting
applications for operations use,
and to evaluate historical data
to develop process models as a
basis for advanced process
control strategy implementation;
where each of these tools and
techniques can enhance plant
performance and provide
additional insights that will
benefit process operators.
These BDP
engineering services compliment
the skills and resources
available at the processing
plant, and enable our clients to
maximize the benefit of their
installed control systems.
Contact BDP Inc. for more
information on similar control
system services and process
control improvements to enhance
your plant operations today.
Partial
List of Current Projects at BDP:
<>
Engineering, configuration, E/I
design and equipment selection
for a skid-mounted cryogenic gas
plant to be exported to Nigeria.
<> Process
control consulting and DCS
configuration for a grass-root
NGL fractionation facility in
Texas.
<> Electrical
and instrument design services
for new compressor stations in
the Marcellus Shale region.
<>
Engineering, configuration, and
commissioning support for PCS and
SIS applications at a grass-root
cryogenic gas plant in Texas.
<>
Engineering, configuration, E/I
design for a skid-mounted
cryogenic gas plant to be
installed in North Texas.
Partial
List of Systems included in
recent BDP projects:
<> Emerson Delta V control
system.
<> Honeywell Experion PKS
system.
<> PAC8000 process
control system from GE
Intelligent Platforms.
<> Wonderware
InTouch HMI with
Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLC. |
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