The Rotork Smart Valve Monitoring (SVM) system has been selected to provide a networked solution for digital valve monitoring and partial stroke testing on a large scale oilfield installation in the Middle East. The system is designed to deliver predictive maintenance information from widely distributed areas for use by the operators to reduce shutdowns and improve overall plant efficiency.
This is made possible by the ability of the SVM to be integrated into an existing Ethernet and fibre optic infrastructure, enabling over one hundred monitored valve actuators on wellheads at numerous locations to be networked over distances of 10km or more.
The SVM field control units on this project are attached to the emergency shutdown (ESD) circuits for shut-off valves installed in sets of two and four on more than 50 wellheads. Analysis is performed on the SVM server computer in the centralised control room. Communication between wellhead sites and the computer is fully integrated within the operator’s existing network infrastructure. The SVM field units are incorporated into the Ethernet network that links other equipment and instrumentation at each wellhead site. A fibre optic link is then used to transmit the data to intermediate engineering and control stations at two manifold sites. From these sites, fibre optic links are again used to transmit data from all the wellheads to the centralised control room.
Partial stroke testing is a function is used to help identify possible failure modes on a shutdown or ESD valve without disrupting the process.
