US-based Technology and engineering company Emerson Process Management announced the release of an integrated Heat Exchanger Monitoring Solution that improves operations performance and reduces energy costs.

The solution is part of Emerson’s new suite of Essential Asset Monitoring applications. The pre-engineered heat exchanger solution embeds process and exchanger best practices into software using existing wired and new wireless instrument applications for cost-effective, automated 24-hour, seven-days-a-week monitoring.

Emerson’s Heat Exchanger Monitoring Solution allows maintenance personnel to schedule time for cleaning, in order to sustain better heat transfer. As a result, facilities can reduce energy and capacity loss, owing to fouling by up to 10%.

For a 250 000 bl/d refinery, that could mean saving as much as $3.5-million or more a year, across all process units.

The environmental footprint is decreased by avoiding additional emissions from heater operation, owing to improved heat recovery in the process. Safety is improved, as wireless data transfer reduces hazardous information-gathering trips to the field, among exchangers that can be difficult to access, which are stacked and are filled with hot flammable fluids.

“Typical process facilities use hundreds of heat exchangers, which foul over time, resulting in missed operating targets,” says Emerson Process Management director of applications development Pete Sharpe, explaining that fouling typically occurs slowly but can be accelerated by inlet stream impurities or incompatible crude blends.

Energy costs rise when fouling forces downstream process heaters to supply more energy because of heat transfer degradation in preheat exchangers, he explains

. “Increased demand on downstream fired heaters can also diminish throughput as operating temperature limits are reached, and can also increase emissions and potential fines. “Avoiding these problems requires an effective cleaning programme that enhances oper- ations and eliminates costs and time lost owing to unnecessary schedule-driven cleaning or manual exchanger surveys,” Sharpe says.

The Heat Exchanger Moni-toring Solution is scalable and users choose the number and type of monitoring applications and instruments that are needed for their facility. Dynamic temperature and pressure measurements are trended, historised, and ana- lysed, delivering alerts of accelerated fouling and improved time to clean.

Heat transfer, exchanger heat-transfer coefficient, fouling factors and cost of degradation can be calculated. Operations personnel can obtain valuable insight into operations that can be adversely affected by exchanger fouling.

The monitoring instruments are easily installed and commissioned to form a wireless field network for automatic online measurements, says Emerson, which entails the Heat Exchanger Monitoring Solution using maintenance screens to communicate continuous online diagnostics and application data to user host systems, control systems and historians.

“The new automated monitoring solutions reduce costs through pre-engineering savings and wireless efficiency. “Whereas wired, continuous monitoring is traditionally afforded for only the most expensive and critical heat exchangers, the lower costs of Essential Asset Monitoring Solutions enable expanded asset oversight,” adds Sharpe.

Transport and offshore installation of large and heavy structures company Dockwise this year selected Emerson to supply the control systems that help maintain stability and structural integrity for its semisubmersible heavy transport vessel, which Dockwise says is the largest of its kind in the world.

The new vessel is called the Dockwise Vanguard and is designed for heavy marine transport and offshore dry docking, enabling oil and gas operators to design and build larger and heavier offshore structures such as floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels.

Because of Dockwise Vanguard’s loading capacity of up to 110 000 metric tons and its bowless design, it is now possible to fabricate these megastructures and load and transport them intact to remote offshore wells or production sites.

This, Dockwise says, helps cut costs, lower risks, improve schedule flexibility and reduce offshore working hours required to get these megastructures into operation.

Emerson supplies a comprehensive ballast control system, which is responsible for helping the Dockwise Vanguard submerge and rise with stability and integrity.

The vessel relies on tank gauging systems that provide highly accurate level measurements for load calculations as well as high level and overfill alarms.

The Dockwise Vanguard also uses Emerson’s smart wireless technology to measure and transmit tank level data to the wheelhouse.

“Emerson’s ballast control technologies are an important factor in allowing us to provide this first-of-its-kind carrying capacity, as well as provide a dry dock capability at offshore production sites for repair and retrofit, which saves significant time and money,” says Dockwise fleet supervision manager Eugène van Dodeweerd.

He adds that conditions in the offshore environment require ballast control that is also easy to operate and maintain, and that Emerson has proven the reliability of its marine tank management systems on a number of other Dockwise vessels.

“The design and execution of the Dockwise Vanguard fits in perfectly with Emerson’s goals. This vessel redefines the entire heavy marine transport industry,” says Emerson president Steve Sonnenberg.