A General Method for Handling Disturbances on Utilities in the Process Industry

Abstract

Utilities, such as steam or cooling water, have shown to play an important role within the process industry, since a malfunctioning utility is a plant-wide disturbance that can lead to large revenue losses due to reduced production quantities. This work focuses on identifying disturbances on utilities that give economical consequences. Measures of utility availability and area availability are introduced and used for estimating the ratio of disturbances on utilities. A generic method for handling disturbances on utilities is presented, which could be applied using site models of different level of detail. Some modeling approaches for modeling a site are described and the framework of the general method is demonstrated with a case study example at Perstorp AB, Sweden.

Nearest neighbors method for detecting transient disturbances in process and electromechanical systems

“…The anomaly index values represented in the color plot can be assigned to time indices in order to visualize the presence of transients over time. This is done by converting from the indices of embedded vectors, j, in to time indices i using the principle in Equation (5).…”

“…The reason is that these subsystems also interact with the process through energy and signal paths, and therefore disturbances can also propagate between them [4,5].…”

A Tool for Utility Disturbance Management

“…These disturbances are often plant-wide disturbances that affect several production areas at a site, which makes their impact on production hard to predict. Lindholm et al (2011b) presented a general method for reducing the economical effects of disturbances in utilities. This method was applied to an industrial site in Lindholm et al (2011a) using an on/off production modeling approach.…”

“…Lindholm et al (2011b) presented a general method for reducing the economical effects of disturbances in utilities. This method was applied to an industrial site in Lindholm et al (2011a) using an on/off production modeling approach. In the present study, a matrix representation of a site and its utilities is introduced, that simplifies use of the method in Lindholm et al (2011b).…”

“…This method was applied to an industrial site in Lindholm et al (2011a) using an on/off production modeling approach. In the present study, a matrix representation of a site and its utilities is introduced, that simplifies use of the method in Lindholm et al (2011b). Performace indicators such as utility and area availability are easily calculated, and the revenue loss caused by each utility is estimated via the on/off production modeling approach.…”