Refinery of The Future

A four-vendor collaboration is helping Texmark manage 130 pumps and may be giving us a glimpse at the refinery of the future.

An enterprise-computing and IT-infrastructure company’s user event seems a weird place for a discussion of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the refinery of the future.

But there I was moderating a bloggers’ Coffee Talk with Doug Smith, CEO, and Linda Salinas, plant manager, of Texmark Chemicals Inc. (Galena Park, TX, texmark.com), along with executives of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE, Palo Alto, CA; hpe.com) and PTC ThingWorx (Needham, MA, ptc.com). Somewhat later, I interviewed an executive from Flowserve Corp. (Irving, TX, flowserve.com). That manufacturer of pumps was also integral to the system.

Historically, Texmark has depended on physical inspections of process equipment to ensure all systems remain in working order. However, these plant walk-downs can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. The plant contains 130 pumps and personnel spend nearly 1,000 hr./yr. on walk-downs and vibration analysis.

The company’s vision for next-generation worker safety, production, and asset management hinges on the emerging promise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT): sensored devices combined with advanced analytics software to generate insights, automate its environment, and reduce the risk of human error.

The project established the digital foundation by enabling edge-to-core connectivity. HPE’s Aruba company deployed a secure wireless mesh network with Class 1 Div 1 access points and used its ClearPass product for secure network access control. HPE also upgraded the plant-control room to enable edge-to-core connectivity and high-speed data capture and analytics. The HPE Edgeline system runs Texmark’s distributed-control-system software, integrating its operations technology and IT into a single system.

The project then expanded to predictive analytics, advanced video analytics, safety and security, connected worker, and full lifecycle asset management.

My interview with Flowserve about its role in the project reveals a glimpse of the future for operations and maintenance in a plant. Doug Smith repeated several times the importance of pumps to the health of the refinery.

Flowserve pumps are used throughout the plant. The company’s engineers have modeled its pumps digitally for what is good and what can go wrong. It has developed a prognostic bot that monitors data from each pump, supplying important data to a software client.

“Bluetooth is the next RFID.” You all know about Bluetooth, right, the wireless connection for headphones to your smartphone? Flowserve engineers have added a Bluetooth radio to the pumps. Then they wrote a smartphone app. A technician need only get within Bluetooth range of a pump, start the app, and read the status of the pump. The data can be recorded and passed on to operations, maintenance, and databases for historical analysis. This workflow is superior to manual recording on paper.

Think of this as a potentially disruptive combination—the DCS and data hub is supplied by an IT vendor, the human-machine interface screens supplied by an IIoT vendor, and data/data collection by the pump vendor. I think we are glimpsing the future here. EP

Contributing editor Gary Mintchell is an industrial-technology subject matter expert, co-founder of a technology magazine, and founder of The Manufacturing Connection. He can be reached at gmintchell@efficientplantmag.com or on Twitter at @garymintchell.