Process facilities operate 24/7.  They can be left operating blind if process and equipment monitoring is too infrequent.  Until now, essential assets have not been adequately monitored due to captial budget limits.  Breaking through these cost barriers, Emerson's suite of Essential Asset Monitoring solutions uses cost-effective wireless monitoring to expand visibility.  This helps owner-operators increase production capacity by 1.2%, save 14% of maintenance costs, and 2% of energy costs.

Challenge:  You are responsible for meeting production commitments while minimizing slowdowns and eliminating shutdowns. You’re also expected to reduce maintenance and energy costs.  Safety and the environment continue to be your top priorities, and you have a zero-incident goal.

Since equipment failures are a common cause of outages and incidents, it is typical for process facilities to dynamically monitor the most critical and expensive equipment. The traditionally high cost of monitoring has pressured capital budgets such that only a small percentage of assets are monitored in real-time. The others are often manually monitored periodically using clipboards during walk-arounds.

What If You Could:  Expand dynamic, online monitoring of equipment to:

• See abnormal situations as they are happening.
• Spot imminent failure and take preventive action.
• Know the current health of assets.
• Be alerted to potential safety or environmental hazards due to equipment  degradation or imminent failure.

Solution:  Emerson’s unique new Essential Asset Monitoring solutions slash installation costs and enable expansion of automated measurements and monitoring. The solutions embed process and equipment knowledge into a wide range of applications and wireless instruments to monitor process facility equipment ranging from pumps, compressors, and heat exchangers to cooling towers and more.

The solutions are pre-engineered and scalable. Selecting from a menu of options, you simply choose the number and type of monitoring applications that match with the needs of your facility.  Your resulting solution will include a wireless field network communicating data from wireless measurement instruments and valve position monitors to your host systems and data applications. While our asset monitoring solutions are easy to plan, install, and commission, we also include our SmartStart™ Services as needed for startup and commissioning.

Results:  Essential asset monitoring improves reliability of your process facility and provides additional insight into asset health. Our automated predictive monitoring delivers diagnostics, as well as equipment and process health alerts that enable timely corrective actions to keep the facility online, increasing production availability, and saving on maintenance and energy costs.

Getting Started: Contact us to configure an automated Essential Asset Monitoring solution for some of your equipment that has repeated issues – or choose one or more that are monitored only on a walk-around schedule. You can extend your protection by collaborating with our experts to plan optimal asset monitoring in greenfield projects, or by expanding real-time monitoring in your existing plant.

Emerson’s Essential Asset Monitoring Solutions

The solutions and conditions detected include:

• Air-cooled heat exchangers (Fin Fans): Icing, reduced cooling, resonance frequency, alignment issues, louver damage
• Blowers: Bearing wear, alignment issues, louver damage, blade damage, resonance frequency
• Cooling towers: Icing, warming, water chemistry problems, fan issues, pump issues, louver issues
• Fired heaters: Efficiency loss, pass flow maldistribution, temperature excursions, combustibles in stack, emission limits
• Heat exchangers: Heat duty, fouling, plugging, solid precipitation, vaporization in tubes, lost energy costs
• Pipes and Vessels: High corrosion, insufficient inhibitor, high-pressure events, high-temperature events
• Pumps: Cavitation, lubrication issues, seal leaks, bearing wear, alignment issues, plugged strainer
• Simple Compressors:  Bearing wear, lubrication issues, blade imbalance, alignment problems