A dramatic increase of cloud service providers and inexpensive IoT devices has fueled a data explosion and started IoT era. Cloud computer cluster can provide nearly any system with scalable storage resources, complex data processing capabilities and simplified deployment services.
However, as a growing number of IoT applications are deployed for real-time data processing and transmitting the huge amount of IoT data to the cloud, unpredictable delays are introduced bringing heavy burden to the Internet with limited capacity.
It is crucial for distillation facility control and monitoring system to:
- support real-time continuous process;
- allow direct plant control by local operator only;
- recognize and prevent possible hazardous situations.
Cloud computing can not be considered a reliable method for distillation control, since decentralized data processing increases the risk of plant stop or even failure.
However, distillation should not be considered as a detached production process. It is part of complicated chemical production. Typically distillation happens after processes like fermenting, hydrolysis or long range mixture transportation; and can be followed by multiple processes, like cracking or esterification. Therefore, cloud services can be useful for:
- large-scale production data storage;
- process control notifications;
- production quality data sharing with other facilities, like warehouses or customer facilities;
- support team coordination.
By using remote computer cluster as a data storage we can analyze flows in distillation process and improve general cost-efficiency. With distillation mixture quality information availability plant work can be adjusted on the fly. Product quality can be predicted during the process and further shared with post-distillation plants. Support team does not have to be available at the plant for maintenance, it can obtain all the data and analytics from cloud service.
Distillation plant remote notifications are powerful tool. They help operator to pay attention exactly where it is required and regardless of operator's location.