Protect Your Pumps, Production, and People
Pumps are essential to process facility operation. Failures cause an estimated 0.2% production loss, and pump repairs consume 7% of the maintenance budget. Pre-engineered Pump Health Monitoring solutions deliver diagnostics information to predict issues and take corrective action to reduce downtime and maintenance costs.
Challenge: Process facilities rely heavily on pump operation. For example, a 250,000 barrel per day refinery likely has about 200 pumps in uses ranging from crude unit feed to downstream applications. Unanticipated pump failures cause facility slowdowns or shutdowns. They can also lead to safety and environmental incidents or fires that bring negative publicity and more frequent agency audits as well as remediation costs and fines.
There are literally dozens of root causes for damage to a pump and related failure. Changes to process variables can result in a change of pump performance, including cavitation damage to the pump itself. Additionally, normal mechanical wear can result in the failure of seals, bearings or other internals. Misaligned or imbalanced installation can also contribute to problems. Often a symptom of another problem, excessive vibration is a very common result that leads to bigger problems.
The Anatomy of Pump Failure
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Increased visibility to the status of pumps is needed to avoid issues, but currently only a small percentage is continuously monitored. The balance are checked only periodically during field walk-arounds. High installation and commissioning costs have limited the number of pumps able to be monitored. This results in pumps running blind most of the time, increasing the risk of unanticipated pump failures, leaks, fires, or other dangerous situations.
What if you could: Present operations and maintenance personnel with real-time pump health data and alerts from all essential pumps to forewarn them of abnormal operations (like cavitation) or imminent failure? Staff could then take corrective action to avoid slowdowns and shutdowns, and could reduce costs by performing maintenance when conditions call for it rather than on a fixed-whether-it-needs-it-or-not basis.
Solution: Emerson's Essential Asset Monitoring suite minimizes installation costs and expands automated monitoring. One of these solutions, Pump Health Monitoring, embeds process and pump knowledge into software and wireless instrument applications. Pre-engineered applications cut project costs, and wireless technology saves on installation costs and time when compared to traditional wired technology.
Pump Health Monitoring Solution: Field Network and HMI display
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Your solution can include a wireless field network communicating continuous real-time diagnostics and application data from wireless measurement instruments to your host system's HMI display 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: Process pump monitoring and diagnostics can save more than $1 million dollars annually by reducing maintenance costs and production losses by up to 30% in a typical 250,000-barrels-per-day refinery. Maintenance is lowered since the use of predictive diagnostics to enable early corrective actions is less expensive than repairing a failed pump. Production is also aided by alerts that enable action to avoid slowdowns and shutdowns.
Getting Started: Contact us to configure a real-time pump health monitoring solution for a pump with repeated issues or for one or more that are monitored only on a walk-around schedule. Our pre-engineered Pump Health Monitoring solutions are scalable, enabling you to choose which options to monitor for early detection and warning. For example, if you have pumps that have experienced cavitation previously, your Pump Health Monitoring solutions from Emerson might include differential pressure and vibration detection sensors, letting you identify abnormal conditions in time to correct them. You could also expand your solutions to include leak detection or level measurement to gain visibility to seal failures.
You can extend your protection by collaborating with our experts to expand automated asset monitoring throughout your existing plant or by planning optimal pump health monitoring on an entire greenfield project.
Start now to protect your essential pumps, production, and people. Refer to Emerson’s Scalable Pre-engineered Pump Health Monitoring Solutions Profile for more information.
