Alarm Confidence?

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Published on Friday, 15 July 2011 09:35

Operator alarm limits are important as the first line of defence for a process and should give the operator sufficient time to understand and correct a problem before it becomes dangerous. The values at which the alarm limits are set determines this but setting the limits ‘too tight’ produces too many alarms for the operator to be able to assimilate and use in the time available.

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What system changes will I need for Geometric Process Control?

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Published on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 09:34

Many people often ask what system changes are required to implement any of our products and that answer is - its simple.

The GPC system works with process and quality data already captured in the existing plant historian or even in manual spreadsheets of data. This means that any plant, regardless of how advanced the systems in place are, can make use of this technology. No expensive capital outlays are required, the software is provided on a CD from which the programs are installed.

The only requirements are a Windows based operating system 2000 or above. A Windows based network is required for network installations (as opposed to individual licenses).

GPC in pharma

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Published on Friday, 24 June 2011 12:55

For pharmaceutical companies, QbD and PAT are current hot topics. Fundamental to these concepts are design spaces, control spaces and operating spaces. These concepts are relatively easy to understand in two or three variable problems, but in real-world situations where many more variables exist, visualising these problems is infinitely more complex.

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Batch Processing

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Published on Friday, 20 May 2011 13:03

Batch processes have always been difficult to keep under control due to the number of quite different operations performed in sequence in the same equipment and using the same measurement transducers. But the temperatures that are normal when charging the vessel with reactant initially are very different to those that are normal in a reaction phase and different again from those that are normal in a crystallisation or distillation phase. Engineers have struggled to understand these processes largely because they have been limited to time-trend graphs of perhaps a dozen individual variables such as reactor temperature or pressure displayed on an overlaid set of scales and with so much visual clutter that only one batch can be seen at a time.

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Data Overload? - Let the process control experts help

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Published on Tuesday, 17 May 2011 13:04

Do you ever find that your process historian is excellent at capturing valuable data but then you have little time to truly understand what the data is trying to tell you? It’s another thing to add to the list of tasks you probably won’t get done today. Eventually, you’ll sit down minutes before the monthly meeting and use your highlighter pen to go over some discrepancies in the monthly data overview. There’s information there - but you don’t have time to play detective with your spreadsheet.

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