Five Things Your Control System Knows, But Wont Tell You

George Buckbee, P.E.

2013 ExperTune Inc.

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Five Things Your Control System Knows, But Wont Tell You
George Buckbee, ExperTune Inc. 2013 ExperTune Inc

Summary
Your control system is keeping secrets from you. The control system (DCS or PLC) and data historian have a huge amount of data from your plant. But they are not telling you the most important secrets that lie within. This paper explains how to uncover these secrets, and use the answers to improve the bottom-line operation of your plant.

Overview
Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink
Your control system is awash in data. Every second more data pours in, from instruments and analyzers throughout the plant. The data historian dutifully stores it away, so that you have Megabytes, Gigabytes, or even Terabytes of data. It is so much data that it can be overwhelming. You could easily spend days or weeks poring through the data, looking for something significant. The control system and data historian are dutifully sharing it all. And yet, it seems they are hiding the important information, somewhere in this mountain of data.

Treasure Lies Beneath

The secrets in the control system are like treasure chests sunken beneath the sea of data. Even with all the data shared openly, the control system is hiding some of the most interesting information. If you ask the right questions, you can uncover these secrets, and your control system can deliver much greater value. Uncover these secrets, and you can: Increase Production Rate Reduce Energy Costs Increase Reliability Stabilize the Plant

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Im Not Doing My Job

Would your manager be happy with you if you only did 60% of your job? Yet the Control System gets by with this level of performance on a daily basis. We know this from studies in hundreds of plants across a wide variety of process industries.

What is Not Working?

In North America, as much as 30% of control loops are operating in manual. Another 10% are constrained, with outputs 100% open. With loops in manual or saturated controllers, the control system is not doing any control! The operator needs to follow the process more closely. The system will not respond to upsets.Safety and environmental results may be compromised. In North
America, it is typical for as much as 30% of DCS control loops to be operating in manual.

You have invested millions of dollars in your Control System. It is simply not acceptable to have 30-40% of the control system not doing any control.

Measuring Your Control System

How can you tell if your DCS or PLC is doing its job? You need to track some of these important performance metrics on an on-going basis. The Service Factor report below shows the control loops that are out of control for most of the time.

The report tracks: % of Time in Normal Mode % of Time with Output at Limit % of time with PV at Limit

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The Instruments and Valves are Broken

The control system relies upon instruments and valves to interact with the real world. When these devices fail to do their jobs, the whole system suffers.

Control Valve Issues

Typically, 30% of control valves have serious mechanical issues. This may include: Stiction Hysteresis Oversized Undersized

The control valve can have a huge effect on the process. The figure below shows the effect of valve stiction on a flow controller in an oil refinery.

Finding Valve Problems in Your Plant

Valve Stiction: CO=Sawtooth. Look for this pattern: PV=Square/Step Wave,

Hysteresis: Look for oscillations that decay after a setpoint change. Undersized: Find control valves that are 100% open, all the time. Oversized: Find control valves that never open more than 20%

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Instrument Diagnostics
Instruments fail in many different ways. Some get noisy. Some get erratic. Some go quietly. Operators often recognize these problems and report them to maintenance. Noisy instruments. When connected to a controller, they can upset the process, and wear out the control valve. Erratic instruments often trigger alarms or process trips, then behave normally. This makes them especially hard to find if you are not monitoring them. Instruments that are completely flatlined. They never change, even by a little bit.

PlantTriage studies typically find 1-2% of instruments with serious problems

Finding Instrument Problems in Your Plant

Noisy instrument: Rule of thumb is to look for instruments with a noise band greater than 1% of instrument span. Dead instruments: Look for instruments that have a noise band of close to zero. Erratic instruments: Look for instruments whose values swing very quicklyfaster than is physically possible in the process. PlantTriage reports these issues for all instruments, in priority order.

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I Dont Do What You Think I Do

The Control System Has a Limited Mission
Many people believe that the DCS or PLC will somehow keep the plant running at its best. But it simply cant do it. The DCS/PLC, by itself, is a relatively simple animal. It handles individual controllers. It may even coordinate a few related controllers, in cascade or ratio schemes. But the DCS itself usually does not know the best way to operate the plant.

Finding the Optimum

To get to the optimum, you need a way to tell the Control System (or the operator) where to put setpoints. For individual controllers, the best setpoint is defined as: The setpoint that moves the process closest to the constraint, taking into account the variability.

. In many cases, making this move leads directly to measurable savings.

To help your plant get to the optimum, PlantTriage: 1. 2. 3. Tracks important process variables Suggests Setpoint moves Shows you how much you can save.

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Im Willing to Share
The Control System will share the important information, if you ask the right questions. Most systems will share their raw data via an OPC connection. Or, if you already have the data in a historian, you can pull data using the OPC-HDA protocol. Once the system starts sharing the data, you can do all sorts of great analysis to uncover these secrets.

Example: Finding Oversized Valves

If you can access the data via OPC, you can start to perform all sorts of analysis. In this case, we will look for oversized valves. The table below shows a list of control loops, sorted by the Max of CO assessment. In other words, these are control valves that just barely crack open to control the process. This is one simple way to find valves that may be oversized.

Note that over-sized valves are more than just a nuisance. When the valve is too big, you will suffer from: Poor control Fast valve wear Process swings

You can probably think of a similar approach to find control valves that are too small (look for valves that are always 100% open).
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I Can Help You to Save Money

You Can Save a Lot of Money
There are many ways to use control system information to generate savings. These methods can: Reduce Energy Costs Increase Production Rate Resolve Quality Problems Improve Efficiency Increase Reliability

These are proven methods that have been demonstrated many times. This section describes some of these approaches in more detail.

Reduce Energy Costs

One of the quickest, easiest ways to save energy is to stop temperature controllers from cycling. Start with a list of temperature controllers, then sort then by the strength of their oscillations, as shown in this table.

The oscillation may be caused by tuning, by a sticky valve, or by something upstream. Eliminate the oscillation, and you start saving energy right away.

Increase Production Rate

You have already seen how to identify undersized control valves. Are any of these critical to production? Can you increase the size of the valve trim? Open a bypass line? These can sometimes lead to an immediate increase in production rate. It is typical to find production increases from 1 to as much as 10% of capacity.

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Resolve Quality Problems

By running the real-time data through an interaction analysis, you can identify the root cause of variability. This means that you can get to the root cause of a quality problem quicklyoften in minutes. The surprising thing about root cause analysis is that very often the root cause is found very far upstream.

Interaction Analysis Identifies Root Cause

Improve Efficiency
Process efficiency is directly related to variability and oscillation. Identify which parts of the process have excessive variability in control movement. This will pinpoint exactly where efficiency improvements can be made. Sometimes, you can get big results from a very simple fix, such as adding an instrument filter or changing controller tuning.

Increase Reliability
When you stabilize the plant, you reduce wear-and-tear on the equipment. Again, real-time data can be used to find parts of the process that are putting excessive strain on valves, pressure vessels, dampers, and other process equipment. Further, the data can be used to help in maintenance planning. For example, the valve stiction and hysteresis data explained above is a good indication of which valves need to be repaired or replaced.

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Sponsored by ExperTunes PlantTriage

This white paper is sponsored by ExperTunes PlantTriage. This Control Loop Performance Monitoring software optimizes your entire process control system, including instrumentation, controllers, and control valves. Using advanced techniques, such as Active Model Capture Technology, PlantTriage can identify, diagnose, and prioritize improvements to your process.

Continuous Improvement Tools

PlantTriage improves performance every day. It monitors the entire facility, looking for the biggest improvement opportunities. PlantTriage notifies you of the issues, then gives you deep-dive analysis, so you know exactly what the issue is.

Expert Analysis
Every PlantTriage system contains an expert system, developed by industry leaders like F. Greg Shinskey. Its like having a world-class expert looking at your plant, every day.

Open System Compatibility

PlantTriage works with your control system. For over 25 years, ExperTune has studied process control systems, and learned the intricacies of working with each one. PlantTriage knows how to work with over 700 industrial control algorithms. Also, PlantTriage is certified OPC-Compliant. It can connect to your control system via OPC, or to your data historian via OPC-HDA.

A Complete System
PlantTriage comes complete, with everything you need, including configuration services and training. You do not need to buy any other software. You will have unlimited users working with the true thin-client interface. Engineers, operators, managers, and technicians can all use PlantTriage to make their plant run better.

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Secrets of the Control System

Your Control System is keeping secrets. But you can uncover these secrets by looking at the data that is readily available. Use the techniques shown in this paper to start making a difference today. The techniques are proven in hundreds of plants around the world. If you would like to learn more about how PlantTriage can help to get your Control System to reveal its secrets, contact sales@expertune.com

PlantTriage registered Trademark of ExperTune Inc. ExperTune registered Trademark of ExperTune Inc. 2013 ExperTune Inc.

About the Author

George Buckbee is V.P. of Marketing and Product Development at ExperTune. George has over 25 years of practical experience improving process performance in a wide array of process industries. An experienced manager and instructor, George has also been elected a Fellow at ISA. George holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington University, and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California.

About PlantTriage
PlantTriage is Control Loop Performance Monitoring software that optimizes your entire process control system, including instrumentation, controllers, and control valves. Using advanced techniques, such as Active Model Capture Technology, PlantTriage can identify, diagnose, and prioritize improvements to your process.

About ExperTune
ExperTune Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Metso.

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