Loss Prevention

Digital: Technologies are advancing industry beyond alarm management

Let’s face it, alarm management is a fully mature body of knowledge. Since the mid-1990s, industry has improved thousands of alarm systems, transforming them from overloaded nuisances to valuable operator tools for abnormal situation detection and response.

Reliability: Things rarely heard at reliability conferences

We can only guess how many reliability conferences we have attended since accepting job offers in the refining or chemical processing industries. In my case, starting in 1965, it is somewhere between 60 and 80. If, in each of these conferences I listened to six presentations, the number of sessions attended is perhaps 400.

Onsite

Business Trends: EPC 2030: Five vital characteristics that will define the EPC firm of tomorrow

The state of the global engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) industry can accurately be described as “challenging.” Operating in an environment of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous conditions, EPC firms are facing unsustainable levels of stress.

A new liquid-phase isomerization process for xylene loop debottleneck and energy savings

In a typical xylene loop, C₈ aromatics are fractionated out of a heavy reformate C₈+ aromatics stream and collected in the xylene column overhead. Then, paraxylene (PX) from the C₈ aromatics stream is recovered as product—usually by an adsorption or crystallization process—in the PX recovery section.

Can ammonia be a future energy storage solution?

Ammonia is well known as a fertilizer. However, it is also a potential carbon-free fuel and an excellent solution for storage of renewable electricity, especially if the syngas needed for producing the ammonia is made by electrolysis.

Business Trends: The ins and outs of construction contracts

Industrial construction projects are becoming larger and more complex, with shorter schedules. To meet these challenging requirements, such construction projects are often executed by multiple entities located in different countries that may have different business objectives.

Digital: Better maintenance through better data

When I talk to professionals in the refining and petrochemical businesses, they are always interested in how new technologies can improve operational efficiency, make plants safer and increase profitability.

Executive Viewpoint: Succeeding against cyber attacks

No doubt exists that the added connectivity that modern control and automation systems deliver offers a myriad of benefits. By embedding computing within the process and utilizing edge and cloud technologies, it can provide greater visibility. It creates a digital thread for the plant and allows both equipment and the processes to be analyzed, as well as giving prescriptive advice.

How changes to functional safety standards can optimize fire and gas detection

ANSI/ISA-84 is one of the most influential standards in functional safety and has been a driver for instrumented process safety improvements over the last 20 yr. It is a comprehensive norm covering a wide range of aspects related to functional safety in process industries, including the entire life cycle of designing, implementing and operating safety systems.