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Wirele eHndb
Plnt Beneft rmWirele Technly
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table o contentS
2
Lw-Ct Mnitrin Prtect Pricey Pmp 3wss h yz vs u ss s y
Wirele Prve it Wrth 5ps y s -vu s
ad index
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Lw-Ct Mnitrin Prtect Pricey Pmpwss h yz vs u ss s y
By Dave Joseph, Emerson Process Management, Rosemount Analytical
LEaks PosE ongoing process challenges. Plants
with heat exchangers, condensers or jacketed ves-sels ace the prospect o the cooling water or other
heat-transer medium leaking into the process or
vice versa. Tis can cause contamination and loss o
product. Leakage can prompt even larger problems
when it leads to destruction o valuable equipment,
as the FujiFilm chemical plant in Dayton, enn.,
can attest.
Te site, which makes photosensitive chemicals,
eeds dry materials and ammable solvents, includ-
ing thionyl chloride (SOCl2), to a reactor used to
precipitate crystals. Te volatile solvent is pulled rom
the reactor and routed through a heat exchanger using
a liquid ring vacuum pump. Unortunately, SOCl2
produces hydrochloric acid when it comes into contact
with moisture. When acid rom the process got past
the pumps seal, it damaged the pump. In the last
three years, the $28,000 pump was replaced multiple
times due to corrosion.
Tree alternatives could prevent the problem:
using exotic materials o construction, installing an
intermediate tank to capture vapor (not possible in the
available space), or analyzing the seal uid to detect
leaks beore they caused damage. Opting or a simpleanalysis system was the proverbial no-brainer.
Leak detection can be perormed using either
pH or conductivity analysis. Te choice depends on
the process. For pH to be used, a small amount o
contaminant must cause a measurable change in the
pH o the process; or conductivity to be suitable, the
contaminant must signicantly alter the conductiv-
ity. Conductivity can detect leaks o acids, bases or
even salts but requires stable process conductivity or
best results.
Te chemicals to be monitored by FujiFilm
aected pH. So, the plant installed a pH analyzer
in the vacuum pump seal loop (Figure 1). It chose
a wireless unit to obviate power and output wiring.Because a wireless gateway already was in place or
other process control applications, implementing
the analyzer was easy. It was incorporated into a
sel-organizing network that allows each device to
unction as a data repeater. Tus, i any pathway
becomes interrupted, data automatically travels via
an alternative pathway, assuring uptime. Te pH
monitoring system cost less than $3,500 to imple-
ment and was up and running in two days.
Since the plant installed the pH analyzer in
June 2011, it hasnt suered any corrosion-related
pump ailures.
In the FujiFilm application, the normal pH o
the seal uid (water) is approximately 7; at that
point, corrosion is minimized. o protect the
vacuum pump seal integrity, when the analyzer
nds the pH has dropped below 3, the process is
stopped and the system is ushed to clear out the
acid and return the process pH to 7.
Te FujiFilm application is an excellent example
WIRELEss pH aNaLYZER
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o appropriate use o pH-based leak detection because
when the process pH is near neutral (7.0) the pH
response is greater, resulting in increased sensitivity
to detect leaks. In general, however, pH may respond
dierently to the presence o contaminant, depending
upon the process pH and the chemistry involved.
In dilute processes or ones without buering
action, its easy to predict the pH response. able
1 shows the best leak-detection sensitivity possible
or various process and contaminant pH values. It
gives sensitivities in terms o the volume raction
o the contaminant detectable, expressed rom
percent through parts per billion by volume. Esti-
mating sensitivity requires considering the normal
pH range o the process and the contaminant,checking the maximum and minimum pH o each
against one another, and then using the poorest
sensitivity.
Processes containing weak acids and bases,
such as acetic acid, hydrouoric acid, ammonia and
sodium carbonate, have weaker pH response, which
reduces the sensitivity o leak detection. Tis is due
to buering action, i.e., the tendency o a solution to
resist pH changes. It oten is difcult to predict just
how the process pH will respond in such mixtures.
itrating a sample o the process with the contami-
nant will give the sensitivity it is the volume o
contaminant required to cause a 1.0 pH or other
reliably measured pH change divided by the volume
o process uid titrated. As an initial check, consult
able 1 to see i theres the possibility o acceptable
sensitivity beore titration.
For FujiFilm, the implementation o pH analysis
or leak detection was a low-cost solution. Te option
to employ wireless technology urther reduced costs
and implementation time.
DaVE JosEPH s iv, c.-s s usy
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Contaminant pH 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
10 Molar Acid 9.0 t 900 90 9.0 0.9 1.0 90 0.9 9.0 90 900 9.0 t
1 Molar Acid 9.0 t 900 90 9.0 10 0.9 9.0 90 900 9.0 t 9.0%
1 9.0 t 900 90 0.1 9.0 90 900 9.0 t 9.0%
2 9.0 t 900 1.0 90 900 9.0 t 9.0%
3 9.0 t 10 900 9.0 t 9.0%
4 100 9.0 t 9.0%
5 1.0 t 9.0%
6 n/a
7 n/a
8 n/a
9 9.0% 1.0 t
10 9.0% 9.0 t 100
11 9.0% 9.0 t 900 10 9.0 t
12 9.0% 9.0 t 900 90 1.0 900 9.0 t
13 9.0% 9.0 t 900 90 9.0 0.1 90 900 9.0 t
1 Molar Base 9.0% 9.0 t 900 90 9.0 0.9 10 9.0 90 900 9.0 t
10 Molar Base 9.0 t 900 90 9.0 0.9 90 1.0 0.9 9.0 90 900 9.0 t
EsTIMaTED sENsITIVITY
RELaTED CoNTENT oNCHEMICaLPRoCEssINg.CoM
pH Measurement Faces Acid Test, www.
ChemicalProcessing.com/articles/2006/183.html
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5/9 5
Wirele Prve it Wrthps y s -vu s
By Tim Gerami, PPG Industries, and Jerry Moon, Emerson Process Management
THE PPg Lake Charles, La., acility is one o theworlds largest producers o chlorine, caustic soda and
vinyl chloride. Te site always is looking or operat-
ing economies and views more efcient control o its
chemical processes as crucial or achieving many sav-
ings. So, the plant has been breaking new ground in
the past ew years, using wireless communications to
obtain more high-value measurements than operators
ever dreamed possible allowing them to respond
quickly and eectively to changing process conditions.
Te case or wireless was compelling because, in a
well-established plant like this, its both very expensive
and time-consuming to get new measurement pointsonline using conventional instrumentation. Te cost
or introducing wired instruments in many remote
areas o the 765-acre site is prohibitive; wiring would
run rom $20/oot to many times that depending on
the amount o engineering and construction involved.
Wireless devices now supply data rom numerous
points that never could have been justied otherwise.
Tanks to these devices, the plant has achieved
savings o at least $500,000 over the past two-and-
one-hal years.
For example, operators use wireless inormation
daily to control steam header temperatures across the
entire site, watching or cold spots and making load
balancing and sharing adjustments to maintain super-
heated steam plant-wide.
WIRELEss INITIaTIVE
PPG ormed a cross-unctional team in January
2005 with six persons rom the Lake Charles plant
and three rom corporate I to investigate wireless
protocols or their utility, reliability, saety and se-
curity. Tis led to a written proposal in mid-2005
or a wireless pilot installation; the rst wireless
eort started in early 2006 with WiFi and WiMax
installations. It was thought that WiMax couldbe used to blanket the plant with video cameras
to monitor key locations but this initiative was
abandoned, partly due to the high cost o WiMax
stations and partly due to lack o compatible
products.
In early 2006, the ocus instead turned to blanket-
ing the plant with hundreds o WiFi access points
rather than two or three WiMax.
Te plant installed points rom January 2006 to
April 2007 in A Caustic, one o three units produc-
ing sodium hydroxide. Although the points were sup-
posed to be weatherproo, they couldnt withstand the
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industrial environment. At that time no vendor was
making true industrial WiFi access points. However,
the site now has more than 70 WiFi access points
and, in the uture, the entire acility, including park-
ing lots, will be WiFi-riendly.In the meantime, the plant established automated
long-distance wireless communications with remote
brine elds that are eight to 13 miles away. It later re-
placed the original WiMax stations with proprietary
5.9-gHz access stations eliminating telephone
lease line costs o $35,000 to $40,000 per year and
enhancing personal productivity.
Te learning continued via investigating and testing
every wireless system available. Along the way, the wire-
less team adopted the PPG Corporate I security policy
calling or WPA2 encryption and authentication.
suCCEssuL TEsT
Near the end o 2005 the plant agreed to serve as
a beta test site or Emersons early wireless trans-
mitters. It established in A Caustic a small Smart
Wireless network, which ran or several months.
At one time, that unit boasted 900-MHz networks
rom Emerson and a second supplier, plus WiFi and
WiMax; coexistence never was an issue.
Early prototypes used existing instrument
housings modied simply by having holes drilled,
O-rings afxed and antennas attached to the wirelesstransmitters. All ailures stemmed rom either water
intrusion or low battery voltage. With no sunlight or
solar panels, power had to come rom batteries. Te
original ones lasted only about three months, which
was satisactory because this was only a test.
Te basic concept o a sel-organizing wireless
mesh network proved itsel in A Caustic, where the
inrastructure is extremely dense with pipes, buildings
and cranes. Users dont need to congure the net-
work. Instead, it actually organizes itsel in response
to plant changes that aect the way radio signals
propagate whether those changes are physical,
such as equipment starting or stopping and railcars
rolling by, other radio trafc, or due to an outside
inuence such as a thunderstorm (Figure 1). As a
result, theres no need or preliminary radio requency
(RF) site surveys or assumptions about what the RF
characteristics are going to be like at any one time. It
simply doesnt make any dierence.
Because the RF space cant be controlled, Emer-
sons Smart Wireless systems are based on the assump-
tion that changes will occur ast and oten. Te industrialenvironment is expected to be dynamic with no time
or technicians to react. Tereore, the wireless network
automatically adjusts. I an obstruction blocks line-o-
sight communications, the network nds a new path
or transmissions to reach the gateway (receiver).
Tis works because all eld devices are transmit-
ters and repeaters and are a part o the mesh. Tey are
transceivers with an inherent system-level power-sav-
ing characteristic. Te sel-organizing mesh technol-
ogy signicantly reduces requirements or commu-
nications inrastructure (ewer gateways) because it
allows transmissions to avoid obstacles and adapt to
u 1. t ss s k s-zs u ss k v s.
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changing conditions in the acility. Te network oper-
ates perectly well in very dense plant environments.
A wireless network must take battery lie into
account. Te more requently a battery-powered
instrument updates, the sooner the batteries run
down. Setting the devices to a low-power mode can
save energy, enabling them to operate or an extend-
ed time on one battery. Run times depend on howoten the device is used but battery lie currently can
exceed 10 years by using a low update rate.
A mesh also inherently needs less power than
direct connections. For example, to transmit a signal
1,000 eet, two devices, each with a range o 500
eet, in a mesh network dont require nearly as much
power as a single device transmitting over the entire
1,000-t distance.
Te devices also are secure and meet the require-
ments established by the PPG wireless team. Te
rst o these is encryption with seemingly random
symbols that surround each transmission. Even i a
message is intercepted, it takes too long to decode to
be o use. Encryption keys are changed requently
so anyone trying to read intercepted messages by
comparing them wont be able to break the code
beore its changed.
In addition, a transmission is ignored unless its au-
thenticated meaning that the sending and receiving
devices must recognize one another. A third step is data
verication by the receiving device. Te authentica-
tion and verication rules are built into the devices, so
no oreign device can intercept a transmission or sendbogus inormation to the receiving station.
Te Emerson devices also eature channel hop-
ping, a built-in protection against jamming o chan-
nels by either intentional or non-intentional sources.
Te wireless mesh system has proven to be
incredibly reliable (Figure 2). Ater installation and
commissioning, everything comes online within ve
to 10 minutes and seems to be totally awless. We
put a Smart Wireless gateway out there, start light-
ing up the sensors, and they talk. I havent had to do
any maintenance. It just runs, explains Reese Borel,
PPG process control specialist.
NuMERous aPPLICaTIoNs
Uses o Smart Wireless at the Lake Charles plant,
some o which are in test stage, include:
Steam header temperature profling. wenty wire-
less Rosemount transmitters are proling tempera-
tures on the 175-lb and 400-lb steam headers across
the entire plant. Operators watch these data every day
to check or cold spots and adjust steam throughput
to maintain superheated steam plant-wide. Saturated
steam can harm some pieces o equipment.
Redundant tank level measurement. Eight wire-
less transmitters now monitor caustic tank levels,
providing backup or primary radar level measure-ments. Te wireless inormation goes rom the
gateway to the plant distributed control system
(DCS), where the logistics operators responsible or
transerring material into and out o the tanks use
those levels to avoid overlling. Tese operators no
longer have to manually measure the tanks every
shit instead they do it only about once a month
when a deviation occurs between wireless signals
and radar readings typically because the radar
units have become coated with salt.
Vibration monitoring o centriuges. o test the
ability o wireless to provide vibration data, our
u 2. t ss vs v v fss .
HIgH RELIaBILITY
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transmitters were very quickly installed on Salt
Bird centriuges (Figure 3). Tey provide a continu-
ous stream o vibration data back to the control
room to help operators determine when mainte-
nance is due.
Deluge valve monitoring.Wireless discrete
transmitters are deployed in three areas o the plant
alongside existing deluge valves (each o which con-sists o one water and one air valve). Te transmitters
monitor or low and high pressures using dual inde-
pendent sensors, and alerts operators to any problem
with the deluge systems.
Tank pressure monitoring. wo wireless pressure
transmitters now check tank pressures in a remote
area o the plant where no wired path was available.
Wireless tablet PCs. Te plant is testing these
devices to enable personnel to use the AMS Suite:
Intelligent Device Manager predictive-maintenance
sotware to check transmitters, look up inormation
on existing valves or transmitters, and remotely view
the DCS screens.
Once a test succeeds, the plant adopts the ap-
plication. In all o these cases, wireless instrumenta-
tion was chosen as the best means to save time and
money or PPG while delivering useul data rom
the eld.
a VaLuaBLE sTaRT
For a site the size o Lake Charles, retrieving data
rom some areas via wiring is cost prohibitive. In
addition, getting conduit and monitoring instru-
ments into areas like steam headers ranges rom
very diicult to impossible. Wireless technology
delivers important data rom measurements that
previously couldnt have been made. he plant is
continually discovering additional applications
or wireless to increase process reliability and
improve operations.
TIM gERaMI s s s s vs
ppg iuss, lk cs, l. JERRY MooN s u -
s u es pss m, aus, ts.
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CENTRIugE CHECkINg
RELaTED CoNTENT oNCHEMICaLPRoCEssINg.CoM
Study Supports Wireless in Capital Projects,Emerson Says, www.ChemicalProcessing.com/in
dustrynews/2009/009.html
Wireless Start s to Mesh, www.ChemicalPro
cessing.com/articles/2008/208.html
Wireless Proponents Take HART, www.Chemi
calProcessing.com/articles/2007/155.html
Where is Wireless Going?, www.ChemicalPro
cessing.com/articles/2007/012.html
Plants Smarten Up, www.ChemicalProcessing.
com/articles/2006/077.html
Wireless Wins Wider Role, www.ChemicalPro
cessing.com/articles/2006/043.html
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Capture elusive energy savings with real-time automated steam trap monitoring.
Knowing the status of every steam trap could enable you to save up to 20% of steam loss and $4 million dollars
a year in lost energy. With the Rosemount 708 Wireless Acoustic Transmitter, youll have instant visibility to all your
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experience in Smart Wireless field instrumentation, the Rosemount 708 will enable you to effec tively and easily
capture significant energy cost savings without running all over the plant. Talk to Emerson. Were the experts in
wireless so you dont have to be.
rosemount.com/stopsteamlossThe Emerson logo is a trademark and a service mark of Emerson Electric Co. 2012 Emerson Electric Co.
Escaping steam means lost energyand lost profits. If only I could monitormy steam traps without running allover the plant.
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