Company Announcement - Immersive Technologies has released a new training solution for process plant operator training. Simulated Process Operations Training, SPOT™, maximizes plant uptime and throughput, improves safety and significantly reduces the time taken to train new plant operators. The global process industry loses annual production due to unscheduled downtime and poor quality with a significant amount of these losses being preventable and primarily the result of operator error. Through using SPOT, improvements in the skills and behaviors of plant operators can correspond to large improvements in plant production.

Immersive Technologies’ recently released SPOT™ which allows personnel to interact with a plant environment without compromising safety to people or infrastructure essentially replicating the operator interfaces and systems used to control your facility.

“Process plant operator training is not always practical, particularly when production schedules must be maintained. SPOT mitigates the risks of training on a live site, by providing a safe environment for operators and engineers to interact with a virtual replica of their processing plants. SPOT can be configured to small target problem areas, iteratively added to over time, or be used to replicate multiple facilities across multiple sites,” says Wayde Salfinger, Executive Director - Marketing, Immersive Technologies.

Immersive Technologies has partnered with process control experts, Calibre, to launch this training solution. Calibre’s expertise in mining infrastructure and process control combined with Immersive Technologies’ expertise in simulation based training have been combined to develop this technology designed to deliver operational productivity and performance outcomes.

Powerful scenario management tools permit the configuration of scenarios, focusing on production optimization or contingency training. Exact replicas of existing control systems provided are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. SPOT simulates sensor inputs directly into a copy of existing process control system software, providing a precise replica of system behaviors and interfaces.

Through a powerful scenario tool, common operational issues such as blocked chutes, or power failures can be configured – assessing for correct operator response, and timeliness. CCTV cameras can also be simulated where required, replicating the sensory inputs from the real operation.

Suitable for beneficiary plants, coal ports, and other PLC / SCADA controlled processing plants, SPOT supports a wide range of applications within the mining industry. This system has been demonstrated via evidence collected from within mining operations to provide rapid, correct and effective learning and assessment.