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Operating Envelopes for Batch, Semi-batch, Grade Transitions, Cyclic Operation, Startup, and other Time Dependent Processes (July 2021)
Operating envelopes are fairly straightforward to understand in the context of fully-developed, steady-state processes, but often the processes we’re dealing with aren’t that simple. Time dependent variation in batch, semi-batch, product transitions and many other complications require multiple operating envelopes with movement between them, or even fully time-varying envelopes. How can we adjust our simple in/out viewpoint for relevance to these complications?
This webinar shows the application to these time-dependent processes. Dramatic reduction of quality variability and improvement of cycle times for batch processes, product/grade transitions and plant start-up can be achieved by finding the best historic operating envelope, identifying the processing stages and targeting the key variables that drive process differences. We’ll demonstrate improving the yield of a multi-phase, multi-stage batch process. We’ll also investigate real-time monitoring of multi-dimensional operating envelope models that go beyond traditional single-variable trajectories and use the ideal relationship between variables at each point in the process..
Smarter processing is within your reach! View this webinar and let us show you how.
Enhancing the value of Digital Twins with GPC (June 2021)
Digital Twins are showing great promise for the processing industries. The applications of Digital Twins span disciplines of operation, including process control, predictive maintenance, optimization, virtual testing, process improvement, and more. But these benefits come from bringing more and more diverse data sources together, and engineers already struggle to make use of the smaller datasets they use today! Powerful data analysis and visualization tools are needed that don’t require huge manpower investment. This is the first place GPC brings benefits.
In this webinar from June 2021 we will show you how comparing model and process performance, identifying and tracking process changes, and identifying key variables and targets for best operation are natural combinations of Digital Twins and GPC visualization. These tasks can be done faster and more insightfully than with other technologies.
Science-based Alarm Rationalization Transforms Operation Quality (May 2021)
Operator alarms are the most powerful tool operators have for keeping units running safely and efficiently. When performing well, they are a fingertip on the pulse of operation, alerting the operator sooner to disturbances that might previously have developed into degraded quality, process trips or more extreme situations, and give the operator more time to correct, avoid, or mitigate the incident. But poorly set alarms often perform badly, actively hindering operations by focusing attention in the wrong places.
The single biggest cause of poor operator alarm performance is inconsistent values for the alarm limits. The advice on how to find values for alarm limits is to put them “at the boundary of where you normally operate” but that’s not easily done with several hundred alarmed variables and no efficient way to see the boundary of where you normally operate across hundreds or thousands of process variables. PPCL’s Geometric Process Control (GPC) technology makes it simple to find and see historic process operations, making it possible to easily see the entire relationship between the process operating envelope and existing or proposed alarm limits.
In this webinar from May 2021 you will see how Rationalising your Operator Alarms using Operating Envelopes could be the gateway to larger financial benefits with less investment than other applications available to you.
Building an Abnormal Event Detection Model (April 2021)
Abnormal events like mechanical faults and unexpected disturbances cause process variation leading to degraded quality and even lost production time due to the actions of safety systems resulting in trips.In this webinar we demonstrate Geometric Process Control, a low-cost process visualization technology for building models that can be used to understand historic events as well as providing a real-time model that can capture deviations in real-time, alerting operations to impending degraded process operation.
Improving Energy Efficiency in Process Plants (March 2021)
This webinar presents examples of using our novel process analysis and control technology to show how process can be made easier to operate without increasing energy usage while still replicating low energy usage conditions found in the past. Once it is known how the plant should be operated it becomes easy to compare that with how it operates now and calculate the cost advantage to making operating changes. We’ll share success stories, where users have been able to make dramatic improvements by visualizing their own historic process data.
Using GPC to Reduce Variability, Increase Efficiency and Make More Money (January 2021)
Geometric Process Control (GPC), the only technology for viewing and exploiting fully multi-dimensional operating envelopes, brings proven benefits in productivity and safety to the many sites using it. This free webinar provides an overview of the technology with real-world application examples.
GPC lets engineers make fuller use of historic data than they have ever considered, enabling more questions to be asked and answered. By reducing process variability and targeting best operation, this provides measurable benefits in reducing costs, improving uptime, increasing quality, and providing a safer process. Operating envelopes connect business strategy, operations management and process operations, contributing to OpEx implementation.
In this webinar from January 2021 we present cases where our users have reduced energy costs, improved process reliability, and streamlined alarm improvement. Showcasing GPC in a fully visual way that makes the correlations and dependences clear without detailed mathematical background.
Driving Operational Excellence: the Science Linking Operating Envelopes and KPIs (December 2020)
A key part of Operational Excellence (OpEx) is implementing a business culture that uses appropriate leading and lagging Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to drive business objectives. Leading KPIs are used to inform real-time operations, and poor KPIs that are contradictory or don’t contribute to lagging KPI achievement are common, and impair, rather than enabling, the execution of business strategy.
Operating Envelopes, the full multi-dimensional relationship between process variables links the process, leading, and lagging KPIs. By using this envelope based on historic operation, potential KPIs can be identified and evaluated for consistency, both with one another, but also in driving lagging KPIs and business targets. Geometric Process Control (GPC), pioneered by PPCL, makes this possible and should be part of any process-based Operational Excellence program.
In this webinar delivered in December 2020, we will show you how the full feed-to-product process operating envelope can be visualized along with current and potential KPI targets. This allows the suitability and consistency of leading and lagging KPIs to be evaluated and improved, providing the link missing today.
Operational Process Improvement: You Already have the Data (September 2020)
You already have the data for enormous potential in improving plant operation through making operational changes to capture, repeat, and improve best historic operation. Understanding your process behavior is key to unlocking benefits such as higher throughput, better product, lowest costs, less waste, and more uptime.
This webinar, as presented by Dr Alan Mahoney, will show you visual tools that engineering and operations can use to extract and exploit the wealth of information available. Thus demonstrating a straightforward visual method of quickly finding consistent limits for operating windows that capture desired performance for many variables at once.
Discover how Operating Envelopes take batch processes to new levels of performance (April 2020)
Are you fully compliant with ISA-18.2 and IEC62682? This webinar from April 2020 will show you how!
Processes that require more than one operating envelope to describe all of their operation have generally been restricted to tracking a single variable, such as reaction temperature, through what are thought to be the most important phases of the process. Operator alarms are often limited to ‘lumping’ alarm limits together from different steps and phases so that there is only one set of limits in use. The alarms they generate are not only wrong most of the time but may even conflict with SIL-rated safety alarms. All of this is unnecessary and costly.
In this webinar you will learn how to isolate the operating envelopes for each of the phases or steps of a batch whether it is a recipe-driven multi-phase and multi-stage batch process, a fed-batch fermentation process, a cyclic ‘continuous’ process or a multi-grade polymer process with one or more transition operating envelopes between product grades.
The webinar is intended for process and control engineers in plant operations. It will be based on PPCL’s CVE (offline) and CPM (online) software which utilises our visual multi-dimensional geometry technology, Geometric Process Control. You will not need maths in the form of algebra, calculus or statistics to use these products, only process understanding. You will learn even more about your process as you proceed through analysis and implementation of a real-time operator guidance model, which I will do during the webinar. PPCL’s unique Operating Envelope method for alarm rationalization is steadily establishing itself in the continuous process industries for delivering much better alarms in fewer man-hours for less rationalization project cost and leading to better process operation with efficiency gains and operating cost savings. The same method applies to batch processes too - and delivers the same benefits.
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PPCL Webinar: Is there still a Role for Six Sigma? Improving Six Sigma to Expand its Relevance
25th and 26th August
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