Coming out of our recent global consultant meeting here in Austin, I heard a great story from Emerson’s Glyn Westlake about a Spanish refinery that wanted to provide their operators with an identical and realistic environment to learn and gain familiarity with both the process and the installed control system for two new units at the site. The goals were to improve overall operator effectiveness, reduce process trip conditions, improve abnormal situation handling, and perform smoother startups and shutdowns.

The refinery had a DeltaV distributed control system and worked with Glyn’s Process Simulation and Optimization Operations team to provide a DeltaV Operator Training Solution (OTS) for the refinery’s new Vacuum Distillation unit (VDU) and Catalytic Dewaxing (CDW) unit. The VDU produces five distillates, which are then further processed in the CDW. The installations are designed for continuous operation.

Emerson’s Vicente Rios, Andreea Savu, and Anetta Vaida developed a solution with the DeltaV OTS using the SEEDS (Standard Entities for the Engineering of Dynamic Simulators) platform. It is a medium fidelity native DeltaV dynamic simulation that provided the refinery personnel a realistic simulation environment within a single integrated database.

All the equipment for the VDU and CDW were modelled using SEEDS. Four heaters, compressors, distillate columns, strippers, ejectors and other equipment were simulated in detail. Also, the SIS logic was implemented as part of the scope of the project. The model was integrated to the real database to provide a realistic OTS for training purposes with the same functionality as the main project DeltaV system.

The advanced simulation tools within the DeltaV OTS helped to provide:

• Initial cold condition, initial steady state conditions with different feeds, hot standby condition—snapshots
• Scenarios—enables depiction of a series of timed actions/occurrences in the operation
• Malfunctions—simulated failure of equipment/system in the process model
• Fods—field operator devices
• Instructor parameter initialization

Glyn summed up the project that the DeltaV OTS and consultancy services helped the refinery operations staff to achieve their operator effectiveness goals and improve the overall knowledge transfer among the staff.

You can connect and interact with other DeltaV professionals in the DeltaV track of the Emerson Exchange 365 community.