Specialty chemicals company in China, receives HART AwardThe HART® Communication Foundation has recognised the Evonik Degussa Specialty Chemicals Company in Shanghai (CN), with the HART Innovative Achievement Award. This award is presented to recognize exceptional achievement, ingenuity and innovation in using the Power of HART Communication in real-time applications to improve operations and maintenance and to realize greater benefits from intelligent instrumentation and automation system investments.
Following research on the use of HART in all phases of the plant life cycle, engineers at Evonik decided to utilize HART Communication throughout their new methacrylates production complex, including design, construction, device configuration, loop check, operations, maintenance and troubleshooting. The complex has more than 2000 HART-enabled instruments and valves installed from multiple global manufacturers.
“We were impressed with how extensively this greenfield project used the appropriate design and equipment necessary to take full advantage of HART technology and the intelligence of smart field devices,” says Ron Helson, HART Communication Foundation Executive Director. “Integrating HART data into their DCS and asset management systems provides full-time access to valuable device and process information that is often overlooked. Providing this real-time information to operations and maintenance personnel lowers operating costs and improves plant availability.”
“Brainstorming sessions based on technical reports regarding the use of HART in asset management systems led to establishing a more efficient loop check methodology in compliance with international standards,” says Luc Sterck, Project Manager Instrumentation, Evonik Engineering-Automation and Process Management. “As a direct result of this implementation, we cut loop check time and costs by 25 percent. As well, daily troubleshooting of instruments are now mainly performed from the safety and convenience of the control room.”
According to Sterck, benefits realized through the real-time use of HART Communication include: easy configuration of field instruments from the control room; easy calibration management of instruments; online diagnostics and status monitoring of devices; automated documentation of calibration and configuration data into the
asset management database; fewer people needed for maintenance; and easy checking/ adjusting of device parameters for better control loop tuning.
“We are now initiating a predictive maintenance program in which priority equipments such as control valves and safety instruments in key implementations receive immediate attention,” Sterck says. “We strongly believe that our plant’s commitment to implement predictive device diagnostics on all HART instruments will bring comprehensive and pertinent operating information to key personnel and therefore assure better plant availability by predicting unexpected failures and avoiding associated downtimes.”
- Evonik is a global leader in specialty chemicals and has been producing specialty chemical products in China since the early 1990s with wide-ranging trading relations already in place prior to this. The Group now has a total of 20 companies and 16 production sites in the region. In fiscal year 2008, 4,000 employees generated sales of over €820 million. Evonik regards China as one of the driving forces of the global economy, and we consequently intend to increase our business in Greater China to around €2 billion in the medium term.
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