One of the largest petroleum refineries in the world is equipped to refine various types of crude oil and manufacture various grades of fuel from motor gasoline to Aviation Turbine Fuel. Due to wear and tear, eight hydrogen valves in each refinery were leaking, and each cost $1800 per ton of hydrogen vented. The plant also had leakage on nearly 30 flare control hydrocarbon valves. The refinery wanted a continuous, online monitoring system that could catch leaks early, minimize hydrogen and hydrocarbon production losses, and improve safety for maintenance.

In order to maintain its share of the international market for thermoplastic elastomers AES recently expanded its Florida plant by adding a new production line. While the existing lines were operating satisfactorily using a PROVOX distributed control system with traditional analog I/O, AES wanted advanced technology on the new line for greater economy, efficiency, and reliability. AES officials were anxious to get this line into production to meet incoming orders, but two hurricanes slowed construction.

The refining company needed to continuously monitor the pressure in Z-Purge junction boxes around the refinery. These junction boxes were maintained at a low positive pressure to prevent process gasses from entering the junction boxes. These junction boxes are widely distributed throughout the plant. Previously these junction boxes were manually monitored by operators on periodic rounds in the refinery.

Alcan had a tight schedule to expand its bauxite to alumina mineral processing refinery from 2.2 to 3.8 million tons. Alcan’s challenge included balancing the capital cost, minimizing the number of construction personnel on-site, integrate the green-field and brown-field facilities without affecting current operating facilities whilst achieving project budget, schedule and quality.

Chinese chemical subsidiary of multinational corporation serves customers throughout the world. Sales offices and research and technology centers are strategically located to provide rapid response to customer requests. Just two workers were assigned to maintain thousands of intelligent instruments in three production units, so they could do little more than react to device issues as they appeared. This costly maintenance method inevitably led to unexpected downtime when a critical instrument failed. Plant management recognized the need to change from reactive to predictive maintenance for all assets, including instruments and control valves, but help was needed in implementing such a technology-based initiative.