Wall paints, windows plastic frames, wire isolations—all these things are manufactured using oil. Oil is also used to manufacture rubber goods and polymers, to create rust stable coating. Modern oil usage is estimated as 100 million bar/day. Oil consumption will continue to grow with the development of Africa and Latin America countries.
There is a process in chemical technology known as distillation. In simple words, this is a process of separating one substance out of a mixture. Distillation is used in oil, gas, food, wood processing industries. Even though distillation process utilizes a lot of energy, its thermodynamic efficiency is less than 10%. Thus, 40-50% of expenses in oil, gas and spirit industries are spent for energy, 90% of which is basically wasted.
As of today, production volume of paints, polymers, rubber goods can't be increased without crucial energy consumption change, which influences plant equipment quantity and its size. This leads to tremendous complication of production processes and significant work safety reduction. To overcome these factors and extend production, industry should be supplied with stringent controls, granular visibility, uninterrupted productivity, and regulatory oversight.
As of today, production volume of paints, polymers, rubber goods can't be increased without crucial energy consumption change, which influences plant equipment quantity and its size. This leads to tremendous complication of production processes and significant work safety reduction. To overcome these factors and extend production, industry should be supplied with stringent controls, granular visibility, uninterrupted productivity, and regulatory oversight.
There are few approaches for oil and gas facilities cost-efficiency and productivity's improvement. First of all, oil and gas plants require regular equipment monitoring. These are labor-intensive and time-consuming operations. People involved in monotonous and repeated operations tend to make more mistakes. For example, oil refinery plant has 120-130 pumps in average. To verify their operational state, nearly 1000 man-hours a year are required. In most cases, equipment productivity indexes are taken with an eye-view by experienced employees. However, what if this responsible person gets sick or goes for vacation? Obviously, production should not depend on a single individual.
My vision of the problem solution is to equip distillation column with various sensors, analyze real-time data and automate distillation control process. This has to decrease human error risks, increase process visibility, cost-efficiency and plant reliability. This approach requires:
- robust wireless communication system to collect sensor data
- database, capable to accumulate facility data
- efficient real-time analytical system, capable to catch and fix minor distillation issues, like column hang or cooling system failure
Communication system has to be cost-effective. Wired communication system is not only low profitable and bulky, but also impossible in certain cases (for example, centrifuge monitoring).
Another point to take into account is state safety requirements for equipment installed at oil and gas facilities. As a rule, distillation facilities work with hazardous and inflammable materials. Manufacturing process requires strict safety measures and carefully built equipment.
A crucial parameter of the industrial facility is response time. Running software in real-time requires minimal response time from each element along with huge data chunks to process.
Moreover, distillation facilities include a variety of subtypes. From oil refineries to water purification systems and whiskey stills. This leads to another software requirement—it has to be scalable for any specific type of distillation facility.
To provide timely and correct information about oil and gas manufacturing state, to support refinery analytics in real-time, to provide clear production process visibility we have to ensure all necessary details have been built in control and monitoring system architecture.