Knowing you have plant assets that need to be monitored and maintained is one thing; being able to do that in one integrated system is quite another. Emerson Process Management shared its roadmap for asset integration with attendees at its recent Emerson Global Users Exchange, held Sept. 29-Oct. 2 in Nashville, Tenn.
Says President John Berra, “I am really excited about this. Emerson has pulled together process equipment, mechanical equipment, electrical equipment and the instruments and valves into one integrated Asset Management Suite (AMS), with a portal that allows you to look at everything through a browser. It’s kind of like flying over the plant and being able to view a plant asset, such as a tank, as a single object. If a change is made in one part of the tank, the impact can be seen over the entire asset—and in a common format.”
The AMS Suite is part of Emerson’s PlantWeb architecture. AMS components include: The Intelligent Device Manager, which uses field device diagnostics to provide predictive and proactive maintenance of instruments and valves; the Machinery Health Manager, which uses vibration analysis, motor diagnostics, thermography and ultrasonics for predictive maintenance of mechanical equipment; the Equipment Performance Monitor, which uses thermodynamic models to compare ideal equipment performance with actual performance and convert inefficiencies to financial impacts; and, the Real-Time Optimizer, which provides plant and thermodynamic equipment models to determine the most economic way to run a unit, plant or group of facilities.
Web Services built into these components aggregate data and feed them, via eXtensible Markup Language (XML), into the Asset Portal. Visualization and business integration is through Web browsers, both local and remote. The key goal is to leverage diagnostics of all plant assets for improved decision support and better economic performance.
