Mar 19: Presently many Indian refineries are fairly highly instrumented and are process controlled in real time on a millisecond basis. Distributed Control Systems & Programmable Logic Controllers (DCS & PLCs) have advanced in a significant way to cope with the ever-challenging operational requirements.
8However, there are certain assets and processes in a refinery that are still not being monitored or analyzed on a real-time basis.
8These are currently thought not to be critical to refinery process control or safety or operational bottlenecks and hence not mandatorily monitored through DCS/PLCs. Also, it has not been economically viable to route them through the DCS/ PLC process.
8They are primarily monitored periodically and mostly through manual interventions and therefore analysis of performance history or failure prediction is not possible.
8A few examples of these type of assets and processes are steam traps, pressure relief valves, corrosion monitoring, catalyst life, liquid carryover in compressors, dosing chemicals,
primary supply & distribution, among others.
8There are now more cost-effective ways of monitoring them on a real-time basis And they can contribute significantly to improving the productivity, efficiency, asset life, process safety
and hence the GRM.
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