Diagnostic tools cut valve service downtime
An
Emerson Process Management - Asset Optimization product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Jul 25, 2005
Valve diagnostic services predict impending problems at Dow Corning, enabling efficient repairs.
Emerson Process Management has been able to significantly reduce the number of valves that are removed for service at Dow Corning, following the introduction of valve diagnostic services to predict impending problems and initiate efficient repairs.
Emerson has a three year contract with Dow Corning, for control valve monitoring services at their Barry, South Wales plant.
The plant is Dow Corning's largest global manufacturing facility for silicon-based products.
Continuity of production is vital and, to ensure reliability, Dow Corning was regularly dismantling and repairing up to 60% of the control valves on the plant as part of its scheduled maintenance programme.
This was proving to be an expensive and time consuming exercise.
By applying advanced diagnostic tools of Emerson's PlantWeb such as AMS Suite: Intelligent Device Manager and Flowscanning valve diagnostic services to each control valve, Emerson service personnel are able to check valve performance.
By servicing only those valves that are identified as faulty, Dow Corning has been able to increase reliability and reduce maintenance costs.
For example, during a recent plant shutdown, a total of 191 valves on the plant were scanned.
Although traditional practice is to fully service up to 60% of valves on the plant, the Flowscanning service verified that only 51 valves required further investigation and, of these, just 16 valves were identified for a full service in the workshop.
Roy Phillips, Control Electrical Engineer at Dow Corning said: "Around a third of the valves that were scanned using Emerson diagnostics had an issue".
"Some of these were minor while others were more significant".
"If we had stroke checked these valves using a 4-20mA source in the traditional way, it is likely that only half of the IP issues and a quarter of the positioner faults would have been identified".
"Significantly, we estimate that only two of the valve failures would have been picked up".
Because a reduced number of valves require full service, the demands on maintenance resources are significantly reduced.
Flowscanning detects many minor faults that would have previously passed unnoticed, giving highly accurate results and significantly improving plant reliability.
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