Hydro Oleochemicals plans long-term, chooses DeltaV
 Hydro
Oleochemicals in Sandefjord, southwest of Oslo, Norway was
built in 1935 and is owned by Norsk Hydro. It is the world's
leading producer of fatty acids, primarily from fish oil delivered
from all over the world. The plant's 110 employees annually
produce 25,000 tons of the product, which is used in a wide
variety of products, from tires for vehicles, to wax candles
and paint. Some of the fatty acids are reacted with alcohol,
creating 5,000 tons a year of fatty acid esters, used by the
cosmetic industry.
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Technical Manager Morten Gulbrandsen
in front of distillation columns
now controlled by DeltaV.
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Covers the whole plant
The production process has multiple steps, including continuous
and batch, to make a large scale of different product qualities.
Until now these processes had little instrumentation and a
lot of manual control. In 1999, Hydro Oleochemicals set about
achieving better control of four distillation columns along
with other parts of the plant. At that time, says Hydro Oleochemicals'
technical manager Morten Gulbrandsen, "We wanted to choose
a process system, which in the long term, could cover the
whole plant. Our evaluation ended up with the purchase of
DeltaV from Emerson Process Management." Important selection criteria
included the desire for a large supplier we could be sure
would stay in the market in the future. Furthermore, says
Gulbrandsen, the system should be easy to configure and maintain.
The system also had to be something the supplier was clearly
committed to for future investment and development. Last but
not least the system had to be built around modern technology.
"By choosing DeltaV," says Gulbrandsen, "we
now have the ability to use fieldbus and Emerson's
PlantWeb field-based architecture in future, larger-scale
projects. For that reason, we expect to get a better overview
of our processes and achieve savings in configuration, documentation
and maintenance."
Given value
At the same time as DeltaV was installed, the old control
panels where removed. From August 2000, the operators have
run the plant using DeltaV from three operator stations, running
nearly 500 I/O.
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Gry Langbakk,
Hydro Oleochemicals
System Manager
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Says Hydro Oleochemicals system manager Gry Langbakk, "The
new process system rapidly showed its value. We had some problems
in the vacuum system, but the automatic storage of historical
values (trends), alarms and events in DeltaV ended up being
an important tool for tracing the problems. Lately we have
expanded the DeltaV process system, so it also handles soap
splitting and the cleaning system. Altogether we now have
6 operator stations and 3 process control stations. Fiber
optic is widely used in the network to achieve the desired
data distribution."
Unexploited potential in DeltaV
"We now have a solid platform for future automation of
our process plants." says Langbakk, "but there is
also a large unused potential in the DeltaV system as we have
it today. When we start implementing the system's full potential,
we will gain further reduced maintenance costs, tighter process
control and better process analyzes."
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