Efficient Plant January 2018 - 48

column | efficiency insight

Refinery of
The Future
Gary Mintchell
Contributing Editor

A four-vendor collaboration is helping
Texmark manage 130 pumps and may be
giving us a glimpse at the refinery of the
future.

Contributing editor Gary Mintchell is an
industrial-technology subject matter expert,
co-founder of a technology magazine, and
founder of The Manufacturing Connection
[themanufacturingconnection.com). He can be
reached at gmintchell@efficientplantmag.com or
on Twitter at @garymintchell.

48

| EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM

A

N ENTERPRISE-computing and IT-infrastructure
company's user event seems
a weird place for a discussion of the
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
and the refinery of the future. But there
I was moderating a bloggers' Coffee
Talk with Doug Smith, CEO, and Linda
Salinas, plant manager, of Texmark
Chemicals Inc. (Galena Park, TX,
texmark.com), along with executives
of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE,
Palo Alto, CA; hpe.com) and PTC
ThingWorx (Needham, MA, ptc.com).
Somewhat later, I interviewed an executive from Flowserve Corp. (Irving,
TX, flowserve.com). That manufacturer of pumps was also integral to the
system.
Historically, Texmark has depended on physical inspections of process
equipment to ensure all systems remain
in working order. However, these plant
walk-downs can be time-consuming and
labor-intensive. The plant contains 130
pumps and personnel spend nearly 1,000
hr./yr. on walk-downs and vibration
analysis.
The company's vision for next-generation worker safety, production,
and asset management hinges on the
emerging promise of the Industrial
Internet of Things (IIoT): sensored devices combined with advanced analytics
software to generate insights, automate
its environment, and reduce the risk of
human error.
The project established the digital
foundation by enabling edge-to-core
connectivity. HPE's Aruba company
deployed a secure wireless mesh network
with Class 1 Div 1 access points and used
its ClearPass product for secure network
access control. HPE also upgraded the

plant-control room to enable edge-tocore connectivity and high-speed data
capture and analytics. The HPE Edgeline
system runs Texmark's distributed-control-system software, integrating its
operations technology and IT into a
single system.
The project then expanded to predictive analytics, advanced video analytics,
safety and security, connected worker,
and full lifecycle asset management.
My interview with Flowserve about
its role in the project reveals a glimpse of
the future for operations and maintenance in a plant. Doug Smith repeated
several times the importance of pumps
to the health of the refinery.
Flowserve pumps are used throughout the plant. The company's engineers
have modeled its pumps digitally for
what is good and what can go wrong.
It has developed a prognostic bot that
monitors data from each pump, supplying important data to a software client.
"Bluetooth is the next RFID." You all
know about Bluetooth, right, the wireless
connection for headphones to your
smartphone? Flowserve engineers have
added a Bluetooth radio to the pumps.
Then they wrote a smartphone app. A
technician need only get within Bluetooth range of a pump, start the app, and
read the status of the pump. The data can
be recorded and passed on to operations,
maintenance, and databases for historical analysis. This workflow is superior to
manual recording on paper.
Think of this as a potentially disruptive combination-the DCS and data
hub is supplied by an IT vendor, the
human-machine interface screens supplied by an IIoT vendor, and data/data
collection by the pump vendor. I think
we are glimpsing the future here. EP

JANUARY 2018
http://www.texmark.com http://www.hpe.com http://www.ptc.com http://www.flowserve.com http://www.themanufacturingconnection.com http://www.twitter.com/garymintchell http://www.EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Efficient Plant January 2018
