Eastman Chemical, Texas Eastman Division updates, looks
to future with DeltaV
In 1997, Longview, Texas chemical and plastics manufacturer
Eastman Chemical, Texas Eastman Division, began looking seriously
at Emerson Process Management's DeltaV™ scalable process system
as a way to enhance operability in the site's alcohol, power
boiler, and de-ionized water plants. Portions of the 6,000-acre
plant site have been in operation since 1952, so modernizing
is a continual process.
As the DeltaV scalable control system grew into full-size
with increased capabilities including redundancy and batch,
Eastman expanded the scope of its application opportunities
-- in any size, from retrofits to plant-wide control in an
upcoming grassroots plant.
VIDEO: Keith
Bellville praises DeltaV's flexibility!
Boiler re-start reduced from 8 hours to 8 minutes
The first project was a monitor-only system in an alcohol
plant. Before installing the DeltaV, restarting the boiler
would take anywhere from 8 hours to 2 days -- a cost to Eastman
of up to $30,000, not to mention the cost of engineers wading
through hundreds or even thousands of ladder logic lines to
determine where the problem was.
Occupying a small portion of the wall behind a panel board
filled with the pneumatic single-loop controllers it will
eventually replace, the DeltaV took two weeks to install --
one week to connect each of two boilers. This process consisted
mainly of wiring changes from the PLC change-out. The DeltaV
configuration basically carbon-copied the original -- simply
changing tag names.
Says Eastman Advanced Chemical Engineer, Keith Bellville,
"When there is a problem now, and a boiler shuts down,
we have a button here for first-out alarms, and it pulls up
a pop-up window with every first-out alarm that the PLC has
wired to it. You can come in and see what exactly shut you
down. We got the boiler running in 8 minutes."
With these results, Eastman accelerated its upgrade plan
for the alcohol plant, bringing two more boilers on line and
completing a 9-month timeline within 90 days.
And because the DeltaV configuration essentially put the
same controls on a PC screen for operators, no training was
required. The change was transparent.
Powerhouse boiler efficiency increased over 80%
With the dramatic success DeltaV ushered in at the alcohol
plant, Eastman looked to a larger, more powerful DeltaV for
its powerhouse boiler. This boiler called for critical, redundant
control. If the boiler was down for a period of time, losing
pressure and temperature, it would require a costly 4-hour
start-up period.
"With the DeltaV system controlling it", said Mark
Daniels, Eastman's Safety and Training Coordinator for the
Power and Services Department, "we don't lose any time
at all. We're able to, in the space of forty-five minutes
to an hour, depending on what type of characterization changes
we made, we're able to make those changes on-line."
With the DeltaV system's intuitive graphic operator environment
and high speed network communications, control engineers could
make configuration changes more quickly than ever before.
Bringing emissions indications from the field, viewing opacity
readings and adjusting alarms on-line allowed Eastman to run
a cleaner, safer, more reliable and efficient boiler.
Selective batch control for de-ionized water plant
The DeltaV system's compact footprint allowed Eastman to convert
what was essentially a storage closet into a new controller
rack room to replace the obsolete electronic controls for
some 1700 I/O plus additional serial I/O to control both the
power boiler and the de-ionized water plant. "To build
a comparable building to house that much I/O in a traditional
DCS, you'd probably be talking around $200- to $250,000 just
for the building," noted Bellville.
The DeltaV system's flexibility made configuration easy,
and operation intuitive. Said Bellville, "With the operator
interface it allowed me to exactly mimic the screen that they
were used to using, which, on top, allowed us (to require)
no operator training."
DeltaV allowed Eastman to pick and choose portions of the
batch software to control a continuous series of sequences
in the water plant. Bellville noted the ease of engineering
and troubleshooting the batch strategies: "With DeltaV
batch, recipes and phase logic are not only easy to configure,
but easy to troubleshoot, I can view phase modules in realtime,
determine when and where problems are, fix them, and view
the changes in minutes." "If we want, down in the
future, we can add separate and even more parts of the DeltaV
batch, it's flexible enough that we can do that without major
configuration changes."
A DeltaV, Fieldbus, PlantWeb future for Eastman
Eastman plans to use DeltaV and Emerson's PlantWeb
architecture as its control architecture of in a planned grassroots
plant, since DeltaV has proven its capabilities in applications
of any size. The DeltaV system is a key component in Emerson's
revolutionary PlantWeb architecture, which is changing the
economic picture for plants across the globe. The chemical
maker foresees improved operations, diagnostics, maintenance,
and installation costs by implementing PlantWeb with fieldbus
and the DeltaV system.
back to top
|
