Rosemount X-well Technology measures the ambient and pipe surface temperatures to calculate process temperature via a thermal conductivity algorithm.
At the 4C Heath, Safety & Environmental Conference, Marathon’s Larry Stumbo and Emerson’s Marcio Donnangelo presented Flare Header Monitoring – Marathon Puts Non-Intrusive WirelessHART Transmitter in Temperature Monitoring. Here is their presentation abstract:
Marathon Petroleum saw the X-well as a new technology for creating Digital Transformation value across their fleet and determined a trial was in order. The goal was to test the reliability of a best-practice WirelessHART installation to see just how well it performed as compared to traditional temperature measurements. Installations were made and tested in four different and challenging applications at one of their cold-weather refineries over a period of one year. With many critical temperature measurements often needing to be added to improve refinery efficiency, the X-well’s ability to be installed with no process penetrations or thermowell, no field wiring, and no added analog input points at the DCS was attractive. Will the X-well pass the test in the real world for Marathon?
Marcio opened by describing the Rosemount X-well temperature measurement technology. It’s a wireless device that communicates via WirelessHART. It does not require a pipe penetration but rather straps externally to the pipe and performs the analysis to determine the temperature of the fluid inside the pipe.
Larry described why this technology was important for their trial. He has a maintenance background and traditional temperature measurements required a lot of maintenance on the thermowells from corrosion, erosion, and vibration. Installation was easy since no wires needed to be run. Given the northern U.S. location, they insulated around the piping where the X-well transmitters were installed.
One application was on cooling water. A regular temperature transmitter in a thermowell and the X-well were installed. The measurements closely tracked each other until there was a failure in the thermowell. Another example was a heat exchanger outlet. The results closely tracked each other until there was a wiring failure with the wired transmitter.
A third example was a flare gas header. The X-well tracked exactly with the referenced wired temperature transmitter. The X-well had a slight lag for the large piping in temperature reading behind the reference transmitter, but it was slight.
Overall, the testing showed the X-well wireless transmitter met almost all of their needs for temperature monitoring.
Visit the Rosemount X-well Technology section on Emerson.com for more information on how these temperature measurement devices provide accurate measurements without the complexities of thermowell installation and maintenance.
