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Ammonia production is an energy intensive process consisting primarily of steam reforming, shift reactions, methanation, CO₂ absorption, and ammonia synthesis. The overall process is tightly heat integrated and the main compression systems (air, synthesis gas and refrigeration) are typically driven by turbines that utilize steam generated through the recovery of process heat by waste-heat exchangers. Maintaining all critical equipment at peak levels of efficiency, availability and reliability and minimizing unplanned downtime represent the largest opportunity for reducing operational expenditure. Having the ability to continuously monitor and diagnose operational issues that impact the performance of plant equipment is a prerequisite for achieving these goals.

As a licensor of ammonia technology, KBR has deployed a cloud-based, performance analysis and diagnostic service at several grass-roots ammonia plants world-wide. This service utilizes operational insight for early detection of incipient problems that if ignored could lead to degradation of process and equipment performance. Smart, proactive, escalating alerts act as early warning notifications of impending abnormal or sub-optimal process deviations and the visualization platform supports quick identification and interpretation of potential sources of problems.

At the heart of the service are operations experts dedicated to diagnose these problems, determine probable root cause, and recommend corrective actions that can either prevent failure or enable quick resolution of current operational problems.

This paper presents the methodology and work process in conducting in-depth analysis of process and equipment health and identifying opportunities for optimizing plant operations towards the upper limits of thermodynamic efficiency. Examples are provided based on the plant commissioning and start-up where rigorous simulation models were utilized to mimic transient behavior of the various unit operations, check out control system configuration, optimize control-loop tuning parameters and validate interlock logic related to the start-up and shutdown of the plant. These examples demonstrate the ability to remotely shadow the plant operations through a cloud-hosted monitoring and visualization platform and leverage the licensor’s in-house experts to collaborate with plant personnel to reduce commissioning and start-up time and to provide long-term support for sustained targeted operations.