(115b) Utilizing a Digital Connected Platform to Improve Combustion Safety and Asset Reliability

Effectively operating any ethylene petrochemical complex can be resource intensive, particularly maintaining optimal setpoints across the steam cracking furnaces. It is essential for Operations to monitor and balance multiple variables in order to achieve desired throughput and reliably preserve asset longevity. This paper will document an ethylene cracker which was experiencing production constraints due to poor combustion operations. This poor combustion created a significant variation in tube metal temperatures and was pushing the fired heaters to operate against stack temperature limitations, CO excursions, and draft pressure imbalance within the fireboxes.

This paper will present OnPoint’s Smart Combustion^TM technology, Ember^TM, that gathers real time plant data combined with John Zink derived combustion algorithms and data analytics to provide actionable insights to operators and engineers for improved combustion operations in process heating. Ember^TM delivers real-time guidance for safe combustion operation over a range of changing process conditions within fired heaters and can detect deviations in certain process variables to alert operators when conditions are approaching potentially unsafe operating limits.

The case study will discuss how an end user is utilizing Ember^TM to understand, in real-time, more detailed information about the combustion process leading to safer and more efficient and reliable operation. Increasing visibility of key parameters within the firebox, combined with key insights about the health and operation of each individual burner, is enabling operations to make simultaneous improvements of emissions, safety, throughput, reliability, and efficiency.