By Knut Riegel
A shutdown that is poorly planned can exceed its deadline, go over budget, and negatively impact the bottom-line. On the other hand, a well-planned and executed turnaround can positively impact a plant and have it operating to its maximum capacity for years. Therefore, reliability standards for all components have been established during Industry 4.0 and became known as “Smart factory”.
This provided a simplified, extensive, and self-organized way of production where people, machines, plants, logistics, and products are all considered and coordinated, allowing for a highly digitized and connected production facility. It takes a closer look at the status of plant processes for condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, plant efficiency, pre-planning turnarounds, environmental improvements, and reduction of incorrect product medium. In this Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) era, the importance of collecting the amount of process flow and proper evaluation of individual real-time process data (Big Data) is growing steadily.
For this reason, operators around the world use intelligent devices and centralized distributed control systems (DCS) to automate their industrial processes for optimum plant performance. The successful launch of smart electric valve actuators proved to be an important milestone in flow control with its simpler usage and commissioning due to their ability to provide detailed valve and process control operational data. The analysis of this data enables accurate plant asset management, reduction of failures, and unplanned shutdown – thus a shorter return on investment (ROI).
