BOC puts systems on trial and upgrades

To remain competitive, BOC needed to make rapid and significant changes in its entire global operation.

Managing energy costs is critical to the success of any industrial gas company.

The highest operating cost incurred in air separation processes is the cost of electricity.

This cost can be as high as two-thirds of the total cost of production, and plants that produce liquid products can potentially use tens of thousands of kilowatts per hour.

Model predictive control, or MPC technology has been maximising process performance, improving efficiencies, reducing energy usage, raw material usage, and environmental impact in process industries for over 25 years.

Many industrial gas companies have realised the benefits of advanced process control (APC) solutions in addressing their unique challenges.

BOC, a global industrial gas company, focused on maintaining its place in an extremely competitive world market.

To remain competitive, BOC needed: the agility to manage production loads, by taking advantage of variations in power prices between peak and non peak times; the capacity to respond quickly and according to customer product demands to reduce venting and top up usage; and to operate consistently at maximum and minimum load constraints.

These challenges required BOC to make rapid and significant changes in its entire global operation.

To meet this monumental challenge, BOC entered into an agreement with Matrikon to provide a cost effective, turnkey, APC solution that went far beyond the boundaries of a conventional APC implementation, applying it to more than 50 plants worldwide over a two year timeframe.

In efforts to achieve the objectives, BOC began testing using an advanced control solution.

ProcessDoctor's automated step testing and modelling functionality was used wherever possible to minimise the time and disturbances typically associated with MPC and step-testing while producing superior results.

The testing of several controllers on two of BOC's process plants showed the positive results they were looking for.

They saw the potential ROI and confirmed this solution would bring operating consistency across all of their plants.

BOC technically proved the software architecture, its deployment and their ability to resource and support the changes internally.

What tested successfully in two plants would be implemented in 50 plants worldwide.

Matrikon's ProcessNet, a real-time decision support application, provided a web-based solution for BOC that included process data acquisition, control system performance analysis, process monitoring and advanced control technology components.

BOC's process data acquisition was accomplished with OPC standards based connectivity.

MatrikonOPC Servers for BOC's DCS/PLC platforms enabled plant and APC data to be archived in MatrikonOPC's Desktop Historian.

The archived data would be used for reporting and analysis.

BOC used automated multivariable step testing, saving time and money while avoiding shut downs.

The control system performance analysis was accomplished by step testing performed from one of Matrikon's remote Canadian offices, with no physical presence at BOC plant sites or remote operating centres (ROCs).

A majority of BOC plants were step tested in pairs of 2-4, in open loop, and 10% of the plants were step tested while existing control loops were kept running.

compared with traditional step testing, which can take up to 24 hours per manipulated variable (MV), Matrikon's automated step testing was often more than 50% faster and had a much lower cost of deployment.

Traditional step testing costs involving plant interruptions and or shut downs, and the large number of human resources could well have put the solution out of reach for BOC.

However, the minimal interruptions and interference at plant sites by automated step testing lowered BOC's cost of sustaining their solution over the long term by enabling more frequent testing and encouraged BOC to move into a second implementation phase with 10 more plants.

As part of the implementation, Matrikon's ProcessDoctor was configured to monitor the MPC and the proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID).

Things like model degradation, PID performance, utilisation, and benefits were monitored actively in real time.

The monitoring reports are made available via a common web interface and are viewed remotely.

There are different views for each user group; instrument technicians, engineers and managers.

Most significantly, the web-based production scheduling system using Matrikon's ProcessNet, real-time decision support software, enabled BOC to consolidate, correlate their data, and visualise production costs and actual production numbers in real time.

BOC is able to automatically ramp plants to manage day and night power price variations, demand changes via the MPC controller, and to communicate targets to MPC in a scheduled fashion.

Visualising data in this way enables BOC to operate its global operations remotely.

The web-based system also provides the benefit of distributed expertise and global collaboration.

An expert in the UK can control and affect operations in Asia.

With data readily accessible and available, global collaboration and timely decision making are providing BOC with considerable advantages.

One of BOC's major implementation challenges was having different control systems throughout its global operations (particularly Asia).

Matrikon supplied OPC interfaces for all of the various and disparate control systems.

The overall scope of the project was another significant challenge.

BOC's operation spans different global regions and cultures, which demanded a strategic implementation plan to ensure it achieved the required consistency.

Matrikon's control and information technology software has provided BOC with a platform to achieve improved throughput, control quality, reduce energy consumption and improve plant stability for 50 plants.

BOC continues to realise increasing consistency in operations across the globe, and is expecting a full ROI in one year.

Without Matrikon's advanced web-based technology BOC would have incurred the huge financial costs of required custom interfaces, time delays and upgrading its entire IT infrastructure on a plant by plant basis, to simply remain competitive.

After having completed the original implementation at 50 plants, the BOC Group is now expanding its rollout of Matrikon's complete control and information technology solution to 10 additional plants.

The solution includes process data acquisition, control system performance analysis, process monitoring and advanced control technology components.

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