Emerson’s Jill Burdette and Twin Eagle Solutions’ Kaylor Greenstreet presented experience with the use of edge computing to automate the flare monitoring process. Here is their session’s abstract:
Twin Eagle Solutions has developed a flare monitoring and smoke detection solution powered by advanced edge computing platforms. The United States oil and gas industry has 6,292 flares that burn off 10.65 billion cubic meters of natural gas every year. To operate these flares, they must comply with specific regulations set in place by government entities such as the EPA. One of the recent regulations is Method 22, which states that they must monitor their flares 24/7 and report on potentially harmful flare behaviors and black smoke production. Twin Eagle has created a solution that allows oil and gas companies to autonomously monitor flares 24/7 and alert on anomalies that are potentially harmful.
Jill explained that pragmatic digital transformation follows a simple, practical model—data, connectivity, analytics, and services. For data, it’s adopting innovative, easy, and cost-effective sensing technologies to install and maintain. With connectivity, implement a set of architectures that ensures operational data security and allows secure interaction with IT and cloud applications.
Analytics can be on the edge, on-premises, or in the cloud. Deploy scalable analytics applications to deliver actionable insights and automate manual workflows. For services, deploy new monitoring solutions, consulting, and implementation services to ensure operational outcomes.
Edge computing provides an accessway to little data isolated in different systems. PACEdge is a fully integrated platform with the functionality to easily develop, deploy and manage IIoT applications and devices.
Kaylor described their flare & smoke monitoring application. Their VisionAery application is an edge computing platform that enables manufacturers & producers to use advanced AI technologies at the edge without straining their network or systems with large data transport. Some monitoring inputs include intelligent optical cameras, thermal cameras, chemical sniffers, LoRaWAN, and other sensors.
Network bandwidth limitations often limit the transmission of video information. Built on PACEdge, VisionAery uses edge computing. The data gathered from a video is processed with analytics locally, and then only a reduced set of data is sent through the network in the form of alerts and reports.
The PACEdge-based solution converts key data points from the applications into code that other installed systems can read (MQTT, JSON, Modbus, etc.)
This same system can perform gas leak detection, liquid leak detection, event-based auditing, remote site inspections, tank/separator level monitoring, gauge reading, PPE and man-down alerts, and predictive maintenance.
Visit the PACEdge Core page on Emerson.com for more information and capabilities in this easy and flexible edge computing solution.
