Digital Data Driven Solutions for Continuous Process and Reliability Enhancement

Most equipment degrades over the course of production runs and its overall life. Key equipment that fall in this category includes furnaces, heat exchangers, compressor, pumps, reboilers, and evaporators. Any significant performance decline in this equipment may lead to equipment changeover, reliability issues, untimely plant turnarounds, and ultimately financial loss.

The tradeoff between pushing equipment for the sake of production and performance can result in a shorter life and incur a greater expense. For example for an Ethylene Furnace factors such as throughput, yield, run length, coil life, and energy efficiency are critical. Achieving better performance in any one of these critical variables results in a trade off with other variables. By using data driven solutions to analyze operational data can provide insights on the tradeoffs to enable the appropriate operational decisions to be made on an ongoing basis. Some of the techniques can include:

• Statistical tools and machine learning models
• Conditional monitoring
• Life Estimation /Failure Prediction
• Degradational Analysis and Loss of functionality
• Predictive analytics for operations and maintenance decision making