Tag: optimization

16 Apr

Is There Potential for Google Glasses in Process Industries?

by Synergy Systems in Industry News
This photo, “Glass Magic” is copyright (c) 2014 Erica Joy and made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

For a short time this week, the public was offered the chance to purchase Google Glass. These glasses have the ability to display information, like GPS, emails and weather, right in front of you without blocking vision. The price of $1,500 might seem like a lot for fancy glasses, but they quickly sold out. The world is paying attention, including the worlds of manufacturing, automation and integration.

Perhaps the idea of having a display in the corner of your eye seems superfluous for everyday life, but Google Glass could provide a great addition to safety within process plants. Plant engineers often work with delicate and hazardous machinery. Safety is a top priority because it would often be far too easy for something to go horribly wrong. There has been a lot of talk about mobile devices, such as tablets and smart phones, being used in manufacturing environments, but they still demand the attention of our hands.

The technology that could evolve out of Google Glass removes the need for hands, allowing a person to work with both while still reading information transmitted by the glasses. In a temperature sensitive environment, workers could always have the temperature displays before them. While performing time sensitive work, a time display could sit just on the edge of their vision in the glasses.

Following the tablets and smart phones that came before, it’s only a matter of time before technologies like Google Glass make their way into manufacturing and process plants. While the current model is a bit limited, with the potential to display only one set of information at a time, it’s not that much of a stretch to consider the possibility of safety glasses with displays. Removing the need for engineers to have to leave a task and check a display could even take a step beyond safety and establish a new standard for optimizing personnel within plants and process systems.

 

10 Apr

Overlooked Benefits of Safety Optimization

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts
Overlooked Benefits of Safety Optimization

Safety is an obvious priority within a process system or a boiler plant. The amount of income that could be lost due to destroyed equipment or injured personnel is enough for any plant manager to take safety seriously. Those who have implemented excellent safety systems have found that they are far more than a safety net. From office culture to monetary savings, optimized safety management offers a multitude of benefits.

The financial benefits of safety management come from the prevention of future malfunctions. While there are certainly aspects of safety that can have an immediate monetary benefit, the prevention aspect carries far more value. When a huge plant has a major malfunction, newscasters love to go on about the millions and sometimes billions of dollars in damage. Avoiding such catastrophes is a huge monetary benefit.

Optimization of alarm management is another great benefit. Part of developing a safety system is understanding what types of issues automation can handle on its own and those that need the guidance of an operator. If a bunch of alarms swarm on a screen all at once, that can create a lot of headaches, even more so if many of the alarms are nuisances. Safety is then compromised if operators can’t quickly decipher which alarm to pay attention to if they get used to ignoring nuisances. Prioritization and optimization of how alarms are handled within in a process system increases safety and frees up operator time for more important tasks.

This brings us to another often overlooked benefit of safety: stress relief and plant culture. Frequent nuisance alarms can create a stressful workplace, especially if there are many alarms appearing at the same time.  Even worse, such alarms can contribute to a culture that slacks off when it comes to safety. This is why the human element cannot be ignored when it comes to safety management. An optimized safety system can go far to optimize the workplace as a whole. Make sure to incorporate training into any new safety system so operators understand how the new system benefits the workplace and how to read the alarms.

The preservation of life and property is a huge motivating factor in optimizing process safety systems. This is part of the reason why we stress it as one of our core values. It’s important to also remember the monetary, organizational and cultural benefits optimized safety maintenance can have. Upgrades to safety systems can serve to improve more than just safety, a fact that only adds to the overall value of these systems.

19 Mar

Top Three Ways Automation can Reduce Raw Material and Fuel Usage

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

Energy PatriotThe ability to procure sustainable value within a process system, boiler room or plant provides a huge advantage to business. By their very nature, these industries use up fuel and raw materials to create products and energy. The less material you need for any given process, the less you have to pay for. When it comes to the production of consumer goods, such as food products, using less material to create the same result means you can create more product.

The secret to sustainability in the process industry is reliability. Instruments should be calibrated for optimized performance and communicate all valuable information to plant engineers. This is where automation’s abilities thrive. Harnessing automation technology in the following ways will generate reliable and sustainable plant instruments.

  1. Preventative and Predictive Maintenance
    This sustainability issue doubles as a safety issue. The worst kind of safety maintenance a plant can have is reactive. Control systems should be optimized in such a way that plant engineers are made aware of potential errors before they have a chance to wreak havoc. This kind of automation, however, is only preventative. If you want to take your reliability and sustainability a step further, you will calibrate for predictive maintenance as well. An intelligent control system can record and remember the continuous activities of a plant and learn the signs of a potential problem before an error ever occurs. When preventative and predictive maintenance work in tandem, they create an optimized environment with few, if any, major malfunctions.
  2. Alarm Management and Reduction of Nuisance Trips
    Last week, we discussed the importance of alarm prioritization as a method of measurement within the process industry. Alarm management is equally important for sustainability. Every nuisance trip wastes energy and employee time.  At the same time, an overabundance of alarms can confuse plant workers and create misunderstandings of which alarm is the most crucial. Control systems can be automated in such a way that all this is resolved. The system will run smoothly and communicate all information in an actionable manner to the plant engineers. This avoids wasted time, materials and cost.
  3. Instrument Reliability Experts
    All the above will be for naught if the system isn’t put in place with the kind of care instrument reliability experts provide. Make sure you find an engineering consultant with an in-depth knowledge of what reliability and sustainability mean for your business.
19 Dec

New Opportunities with Smart Technology

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

“Successful companies have leveraged the knowledge and experience of leading automation companies in implementing smart plant projects to consistently deliver quantifiable business results measurable in real-time, predict asset performance, avoid surprises, and reduce risks to life, plant, and environment.”

This photo, “Control Systems Security” is copyright (c) 2014 Idaho National Laboratory and made available under an Attribution 2.0 Generic

So says a recent article published at Flow Control Magazine. Companies around the globe are harnessing the new opportunities provided by smart technology. As these advances become cheaper and cheaper to implement and their benefits ever more evident, it’s often a no-brainer for a business to update their site assets.

Serious issues can plague a plant that operates on outdated machines. With a limited ability to measure critical data and make predictions, businesses either plan downtime, sometimes when it’s not needed, or have unexpected issues that require downtime.

Downtime, the dirtiest D-word in the automation world, can be dramatically reduced with a system that collects historical data, measures critical aspects of the architecture and predicts any future issues. When known ahead of time, some problems can be handled with now downtime at all. In this way, the plant staff acts in a predicative and proactive role, addressing problems before they cause any harm.

If you are wondering just how affordable all this technology is, consider the fact that many of Synergy’s solutions have an ROI of a year or less. It is said that an iPhone has more advanced technology than what we used to land on the moon. Process control systems have enjoyed the same rapid advancement. What used to cost an outrageous amount of money, is now simple and can achieve more with a significantly lower initial investment

 

06 Nov

Savings Potential of Variable Speed Drives

by Synergy Systems in Industry News

Businesses often question the profitability of energy efficient investments and the speed of their return on investment. The fact is, the areas of a business that can most benefit from efficiency investments are unique. This article from Control Engineering Magazine, lists these areas among the many that have the greatest potential of financial and energy savings:

  • Supply voltage optimization
  • Power management solutions
  • Increased factory or process automation
  • Intelligent lighting control and low-energy lighting
  • Building controls
  • Monitoring and targeting systems
  • High efficiency motors
  • Variable speed drives

Variable speed drives, which include variable frequency drives or VFDs, are one of the simplest energy efficient devices a business can invest in. Using customer experiences and conservative predictions, Control Engineering detailed the potential financial savings over 5 years with VSD installation for 10 countries. The United States shows the greatest potential for savings.

VSDs can reduce energy consumption by 70%, with the most receptive applications being pumps, fans and centrifugal compressors. Other assets that can make use of these drives include mixers, centrifuges, reciprocating compressors and extruders.

Keep in mind, the above figure illustrates the savings potential of just one application, variable speed drives. Combined with other advancements in energy efficient technology, savings can rise even higher. There are plenty of energy efficient initiatives for industries to adopt.

21 Aug

Do Not Let the Flash and Glamour Fool You

by Synergy Systems with 0 Comment in Engineering & Automation Experts
Do Not Let the Flash and Glamour Fool You

Long-time employees of a plant tend to feel anxiety when word of technological upgrades starts to circulate. A recent Control Engineering article mentions that IT professionals tend to be young and used to the latest and greatest platform. The older operators in the plant aren’t nearly as enthused about new technology if the old technology does the job just as well. While there are certainly reasons to upgrade plant technology, decisions about what to do should be made with optimization as the core goal.

Synergy rarely values technology based on how new it happens to be. Instead, we concern ourselves with providing services and solutions that generate the outcome for the client. If technology provided needs to work with other equipment in the plant, then we will find what fits. There are many cases where the latest and greatest technology is also the best to install, just as it may be more financially reasonable to replace a part that only has a few years left in it then to try and find technology that will work with the old part.

Old and new are relative. Functionality, optimization and monetary savings are where true value shows itself. Our professionals are intimately familiar with the operations of a plant and build for functionality first. As a result, many of our services have a return on investment that takes less than a year.

In a world that has become fascinated with the glitz and glamour of graphics and speed, too often we forget about the true purpose of control systems and HMI. Make sure the technology installed in your plant is more than the latest and greatest. Make sure it benefits your needs and goals as well.

There is a lot out there to consider in the world of technology. Feel free to contact our expert combustion engineers to discuss the optimal way you can achieve your business objectives.

 

 

03 Apr

Safety and the Value of Risk Assessments

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

The control of combustion elements in a boiler system is similar to controlling an explosion. Within any process system, where specific elements need to maintain their prescribed balance, small miscalculations can be devastating. This is why safety is one of Synergy’s top priorities. While optimization and efficiency are of great importance, none of it matters if a system isn’t safe.

Regular risk assessments and timely inspections are essential in order to maintain plant safety. The illusion of a safe environment is often created by the fact that no harmful incident has happened. The time to consider a risk assessment is not after an employee or system has been severely injured, but before.

Like every other area of a plant, safety can be optimized for the greatest efficiency. Synergy’s safety measures, including our PLC systems and valve trains, have redundant controls to make sure that processes in a plant continue to operate optimally, even in the event that one small part malfunctions. In addition, we have perfected safety optimization to dramatically reduce nuisance trips.

The highest standard of safety is essential in a workplace to ensure the well-being of employees and equipment. That doesn’t mean you have to pay the highest price. Our combustion and engineering experts would be happy to perform an assessment of your plant and provide you with custom, optimized solutions for your safety, budget and goals.

27 Mar

Changes to Clean Air Act Coal-Fired Plant Regulations a Possibility

by Synergy Systems in Industry News

The Clean Air Act continues to be debated as the EPA comes closer to the April 13th deadline to finalize new source performances standard (NSPS) regulations. According to a Power Engineering Article from March 15, the Obama administration is considering more changes to the rule regulating greenhouse gasses.

The rule established in March of last year would require all new coal-fired power plants to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per MW/h of electricity produced. Existing coal-fired power plants had no such restrictions.

Concerns about the probability that new plants would be able to meet that rule were raised by four Democratic senators, who sent a letter to Obama urging him to amend the standard.

According to the letter, the senators worry that having the same emission standard for both gas-fired and coal-fired will actually hinder goals to reduce emissions in the United States. Not only are they concerned that new plants won’t be built, they also state that current coal-fired plants may choose not to upgrade their plant with cleaner systems because they will not be able to meet the regulations.

The letter then states that it is possible to continue to build new coal-fired plants – with state of the art technologies – and reduce admissions. Continued advancement of technology will help the industry grow cleaner throughout the years.

The concerns of the senators are clear in their letter. If those who are currently planning to build coal-firing plants are prevented due to inability to comply with the law, the jobs that may have been created will be lost and the cost of electricity has the potential to grow. In addition, these four senators are worried that such restrictions will prevent the further creation of technologies that will reduce emissions even farther.

Synergy Systems celebrates the creation of new technologies that further reduce emissions as they also tend to save businesses money and create a more efficient plant. The aim of our Energy Patriot program is to recognize the achievements of those plants and businesses that make great strides in working towards American energy independence.

Goals such as energy independence and dramatic reductions in emissions cannot be met overnight. Fine tuning of current technologies and the freedom to invent new state-of-the-art systems is an absolute necessity to achieving those goals. Synergy is proud to be a part of a movement toward a cleaner society, with systems that are optimized to create the greatest amount of product or energy while at the same time reducing the amount of fuel and emissions used.

If you are curious about what our engineers can do to save you money through optimized systems, drop us a comment here or visit our Contact Us page and speak to our experts today.