White Paper | Data Acquisition Urgency for Legacy Petrochemical Plants

Automation • IIoT • Sensors • White Papers

White Paper | Data Acquisition Urgency for Legacy Petrochemical Plants

Grant Gerke | May 12, 2017

Subject matter experts leaving, a lack of data knowledge in key areas of the plant and aging equipment can be thorny challenges in optimizing legacy, petrochemical facilities. Luckily, advances in sensing and industrial networking are providing identifiable solutions, such as adding sensors via wireless network versus an expensive wired solution of the past.

As part of our IIoT Spring series, MT is providing reference material to help plants and end users with better optimization strategies, even for aging facilities. This week, Emerson Automation Solutions provides the white paper titled, “4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance: Leveraging IIoT to Achieve Petrochemical Operational Performance.”

white paper cover petrochemical industry

Emerson Automation Solutions’ White Paper, titled, “4-Step Roadmap to Top Quartile Performance.”

The white paper provides these building blocks for industry plants: 1) Identify Areas for Improvement 2) Acquire Data 3) Analyze Data and 4) Take Corrective Action. An interesting part of the white paper, below, includes adding more sensing due to regulations, even though rules may decrease with the current approach:

Compliance with all these regulations requires plants to install more sensors to monitor operations, record data and file dozens, if not hundreds, of reports to satisfy state and local auditors and inspectors. Regulations aim to improve safety and minimize environmental impact. However, without investments in new sensor technologies and automation, regulations can suppress efficiency and a plant’s ability to meet performance metrics.