Operational Limits for Industrial Facilities
Operational Limits for Industrial Facilities
Just like lines and speed limits on a highway, industrial facilities have limits they need to stay within to ensure safe, reliable and efficient production. There are optimal limits, normal limits, alarm limits, safe operating limits, environmental limits, reliability limits, trip limits, safe design limits and more. These limits need to be aligned to ensure that changes to one set of limits doesn’t interfere with the performance of other limits. However, we typically find that these limits are stored in many different locations with limited operability between the systems. Performing this check manually is a time-consuming and tedious process that often doesn’t happen.
In this blog, we will discuss why operating within process limits is crucial to maintaining safe, reliable, compliant and profitable industrial operations. We’ll share the importance of limits in both greenfield design and brownfield operations and how digitally transforming operational limits improves our ability to know our limits and how to stay within them.
Greenfield – Aligning Limits to Ensure the Integrity of the Process Design
As the saying goes, a job well begun is a job half done. Limits are first developed during the design phases of the facility lifecycle. As the design evolves and the limits change, ensuring all the limits are aligned across the different project teams can be challenging. For instance, a change in the material of construction of a vessel changes the operating pressure, which affects the risk assessment in the hazard and operability analysis (HAZOP), which changes the design of the relief valve, which affects the shutdown system, which in turn affects the high-pressure alarm limit that the operator will need to act on and so on.
These interconnected changes highlight the importance of aligning all limits to ensure the integrity of the process design. The ability to compare the limits among the various project teams and sources becomes an invaluable tool to ensure the limits are coordinated and aligned. It’s always cheaper and more effective to solve problems early in the project instead of having to sort out issues after factory acceptance testing (FAT), site acceptance testing (SAT) or when the facility is trying to start up.
Brownfield – Monitoring Performance of Operating Limits to Improve Processes
In the operational phases of the lifecycle, the process design doesn’t change as frequently. Over time, however, wear and tear on the equipment, both expected and accelerated, can degrade the safety margin of protective safeguards, necessitating changes. Just like in the facility design phase, changes to safe operating and design limits need to be communicated seamlessly across all departments and checked to ensure the change does not negatively affect other safeguards.
Optimal and target limits take on much greater importance in operations than in the design phase of the facility lifecycle. Monitoring performance around operating limits of all types can yield significant insights into performance and ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall process.
Another challenge in monitoring limits in an operating facility is that the limits can change based on feedstocks, phases of a batch, startup, shutdown or other operating conditions. In these situations, the limits need to be coordinated, updated and communicated in real-time. Monitoring and reporting applications need to be aware of these different operating modes to ensure the accuracy of the results.
Process engineers spend their time ensuring the largest return on the conversion of raw materials to finished goods. Operational limit monitoring applications developed in-house or driven by spreadsheet collections are often limited in capability and tedious to maintain in the long term.
Digital Transformation – Consolidating all Limits into a Single Pane of Glass
Operational limit auditing and monitoring is a good target for digital transformation. These limits live in any number of different systems. Various limits can be found on P&IDs, instrument databases, control systems, operating procedures, asset performance management (APM) applications, spreadsheets and more. Each limit is generally in different systems of record, which are typically siloed by the departments or personnel responsible for them. There are significant challenges in coordinating all of these different systems of record manually, let alone in real-time, as required by changing process conditions.
Digital transformation of operational limits would consolidate all the limits from the various systems of record under one pane of glass. That pane of glass would facilitate the visualization of audit checks to ensure proper alignment of all the various limits. For example, alarm limits should be flagged if they exist within optimal or normal limits. If alarms are in the “normal” region, they don’t represent an abnormal situation. We at Hexagon have found numerous instances over the years of various limits set incorrectly that need to be straightened out to ensure all the layers of protection function correctly.
The single pane of glass would also facilitate the Management of Change (MoC) of limits. Approved limit changes would seamlessly flow to the various systems of record and notify all the stakeholders, down to the operators adjusting process parameters to stay within the limits.
Operating within process limits is critical to safe, reliable and profitable production. Limits represent the operating window of the process and include economic limits, alarms, safe operating, safe design and other limits. These limits are often contained in disparate, unconnected and uncoordinated systems. Digitally transforming operational limits facilitates knowing your limits, staying within them, and proving it.
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