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Equipment

Case history: Quantifying the benefits of alarm management

Honeywell Process Solutions: Ayral, T.
Honeywell: Bilyk, J.  |  Brown, K.

By using timely alarms that lead an operator to corrective actions, the goals are to improve plant safety, to increase efficiency and to reduce environmental constraint limit violations.

Recommended guidelines can help prevent fires caused by static electricity

Newson Gale: O’Brien, M.

For any person working in the oil and gas industry who is responsible for the safety of employees, colleagues, plant equipment and property, one of the most potentially confusing aspects in providing ..

Mitigate fouling in crude unit overhead—Part 2

CH2M Hill: Sloley, A. W.

Up to 50% of the refinery’s entire corrosion expense may occur in the crude unit. The root causes of the fouling and corrosion issues are often linked to the basic unit configuration choices, as ..

Improve solvent recovery in wax production

CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum: Garg, M. O.  |  Kumar, S.  |  Nanoti, S. M.  |  Ghosh, P.

The solvent-recovery section of the deoiling unit for wax production consumes substantial energy. In this study, the effects of operating conditions (pressure), energy consumption and cost, and proces..

Update temperature control for a Claus unit with neural networks

North-West University, School of Chemical and Minerals Engineering: Schabort, C. J.  |  Neomagus, H. W. J. P.

The Natref oil refinery in Sasolburg, South Africa, had experienced refractory problems in the sulfur recovery unit’s (SRU’s) combustion chamber since startup (Fig. 1). Even though the SRU w..

HP Reliability: Maintain proficiency in root-cause-failure analysis

Hydrocarbon Processing Staff: Bloch, Heinz P.

Earlier in the year, the author attended a series of client and organizers’ presentations at the 2013 TapRooT Summit in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. TapRooT is a structured failure analysis and trouble..

HP Integration Strategies: Operational integrity management at Statoil

ARC Advisory Group: Reynolds, P.

Asset-intensive industries continue to suffer from unplanned downtime, failure to meet planned production rates, and too many safety and environmental incidents. Until companies can manage and mitigat..

HP Automation Safety: MTTR: Reality vs. calculation

exida LLC: Goble, W.

Many reliability engineers trained before IEC 61508 know the acronym MTTR as “mean time to repair.” I certainly learned that definition. Naturally, I think of the time it takes to repair som..

Case history: Sasol’s optimization of the catalyst regeneration process for C5 isomerization

Axens: Bader, J.-M.  |  Mege, P.
Sasol: de Jager, H.

Advanced process control (APC) offers solutions to use full catalyst regenerator capacity safely and to generate substantial benefits. Significant yield increases and operating cost reductions can be ..

Improve your choice of process control algorithms

Whitehouse Consulting: King, M. J.

This algorithm, when properly tuned, can greatly reduce the quantity of off-spec material made from a process upset. It can be the largest contributor to the benefits captured by improved process control.