(461f) Best Practices in Process Unit Health Monitoring

The primary job function of an operating engineer at a refinery or chemical plant is to ensure safe and reliable operations of his or her process unit.  It is therefore imperative that the operating engineer employs regular and rigorous unit health monitoring practices.  One impediment to doing so is the number of data and information systems the engineer has to interface with (e.g. process data, laboratory data, operator-rounds data, production planning data, etc.). A common work process is to pull large amounts of data from these various systems into a common, easy-to-use platform where the data can be conditioned, used in calculations, and trended. Many times, this work process requires the engineer to spend more time doing "data jockeying" than analyzing the data.

This talk will focus on a new systems approach (part work process, part computer tool) that automates the data jockeying aspect of unit health monitoring and gives the engineer time to do engineering.