Interview: Automation From the Conceptual Stage on Leads to Cost Saving

Related Vendors

DÜPERTHAL Sicherheitstechnik GmbH & Co. KG

TURCK GmbH

ProMinent GmbH

Rockwell Media

Rockwell Automation GesmbH

Power Controll to Oil & Gas Industries

PROCESS India: What are the things included in your control system package for the O&G industry?

ABANIBHUSAN BERA: Rockwell has lot of power control devices, such as drives, IMCCs (Intelligent Motor Control Centres) and energy management solutions for efficiency. Thus, we have evolved to provide an integrated architecture, which is nothing but a platform – where Rockwell can integrate control, power, safety and information solutions. We call it an Integrated Information Control Power and Safety solution for the O&G industry.

We have power control drives (Variable Frequency Drives) that are required in any O&G application – where you need to control rotating equipment like submersible pumps etc. We also have our next generation safety PLCs, AADvance, from ICS Triplex.

PROCESS India: What kind of technological evolution have you done in your latest safety system?

ABANIBHUSAN BERA: Trusted’ is our flagship product, one generation before AADvance, which doesn’t have flexibility in redundancy and architecture. In earlier safety systems, the two pioneer vendors were giving only SIL 3 (Safety Integrity Level 3) with TMR (Triple Modular Redundancy), thus input, processor, output etc. – all were triplicated. ‘Trusted’ TMR design used a majority voting process to find the source of a fault.

Despite automated systems and elaborate alarm systems, process accidents continue to happen and are often contributed to the 'human factor', Dr. Andrew Lichnowski, chairman of the EEMUA Instrumentation and Control Comitee, explains. In our flipview webcast Lessons Learned: Recent Developments for Process Safety Lichnowski explains what conclusion can be drawn from accidents in the oil & gas industry.

“Not Only Safety, Also plant Availability is Very Important”

See, two things are important in any plant operation: ensuring safety and plant availability. In a process plant, if some nuisance trip happens because of some relay malfunctioning, the plant is shut down. That means – it is a loss of million dollars per hour. So, not only safety but also plant availability is very important. This type of unwanted situations can be prevented by the triple redundant technologies in the PLCs.

If you want to ensure safety at the cost of shutting down the plant, then it does not make any business sense. So, today industrialists want safety...

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