The following webinars may be viewed online. Each lasts about an hour. They are taken from our monthly live offerings. To view them in your browser, click 'Read more...' on the right of the page.  

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Operator alarms are there to allow the process and its control systems to tell the operator they have issues. But if messages are too late or often false, the operators will quickly learn to distrust them and depend instead on their own vigilance, which can lead to greater variability in process operation.

The single biggest cause of poor operator alarm performance is an inconsistent set of values of the alarm limits. But search for advice on how to find values for alarm limits and the answer will be “put them at the boundary of where you normally operate.” For the practising engineer this advice is next to useless because he or she doesn’t have a way to locate that boundary across many hundreds of variables.

The missing understanding has been that alarm limits are not independent of each other but are linked by an Operating Envelope or Operating Window spanning many hundreds or even thousands of variables from different databases, some with alarms defined and some without. Operating Envelopes are the missing link between process capability and operating objectives and so give new understanding to the fundamentals of alarm floods.

In this webinar from June 2020 we demonstrate our novel approach to alarm rationalization by locating the Operating Window and Envelope of any chosen set of objectives and setting alarm limits around its boundary. You will see the usefulness of being able to see and compare Windows and Envelopes for different operating objectives and the benefits of predicting alarm performance with immediate feedback instead of waiting weeks until after the new alarms have been implemented in the control room before you know if performance has been improved.  

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Energy use, both as a direct cost, but also reflecting environmental impact, is a dominant constraint in many industries. Many processes were designed under very different assumptions and, generally, using more energy speeds reactions, simplifies separations and improves overall process operations - but all of that has costs.

In this webinar, first delivered in May 2020, we use our novel process control technology to show how to make processes easier to operate without increasing energy usage while replicating the lowest energy usage found in past operation that hits the operating targets. We share some success stories in oil and gas production. 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.  

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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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Downtime and degraded production from process disturbances are major costs to the process industry. How can we understand these events and implement the changes needed to reduce their impact? Can we provide operators with early warning of developing abnormal process conditions giving them the precious time needed to understand and respond to disturbances before they grow to threaten shutdown or lost production?

In this webinar from March 2020, we present simple visual methods for analyzing large historical datasets and producing real-time event prediction and fault detection models based on process history which can be implemented by the engineer without the need for advanced mathematics. Building models is fast and easy compared with traditional condition monitoring and fault detection frameworks.

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Operational Excellence depends on feedback of lagging KPI (Key Performance Indicator) achievement to ensure business performance meets required financial, environmental and efficiency requirements. Feedback on achieved KPI values against the KPI targets is via infrequent performance reports and ‘dashboards’. These may indicate the existence of a problem but rarely indicate the cause - and no guidance is available to the process operator as to how to address the lagging KPIs and manage the interactions between them.

The solution for effective Operational Excellence is to use an Operating Envelope model which includes variable interaction effects. Geometric Process Control, an innovative new technology developed here at PPCL, provides the way to quickly and easily see such operating envelopes across hundreds of variables. Potential KPIs and targets can immediately be evaluated and compared, and contradictions or difficulties are immediately visible. Performance monitoring and reporting become clear and consistent for everyone involved, allowing process refinement and increasing understanding of how KPIs interact.

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The key to repeating best operation is understanding your process behavior. This is necessary to achieve higher throughput, lower costs, least waste and minimum downtime. While some of this is known in the process design, much of what is taken as true about your process is likely wrong or contradictory. The resolution to these conflicts and a true process picture are already present implicitly in your plant historian, built from years of experience. This webinar, given by Dr Alan Mahoney in December 2019, will demonstrate PPCL's unique visual tools which engineers can use to extract and exploit the wealth of information available.

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Geometric Process Control (GPC) is a technology developed here at PPCL. It lets you see hundreds of process variables and tens of thousands of observations from process and other plant data in a single parallel coordinates graph with supplemental time-trends, distribution plots, and Pareto plots with every individual point traceable through all the views. It comes with an extremely powerful graphical Boolean query capability that lets you extract feed-to-product operating windows and operating envelopes to help you explain why yesterday was such a great day for your KPIs and what went wrong last week when the fractionator column flooded five times.

Why is this important? Well, it lets you benefit from a few hundred thousand years of evolution and use your amazing human powers of pattern recognition and interpretation to determine cause-and-effect relationships – as well as correlations - in multi-variable problems where previously you had fewer than 10 variables to work with. You also would have needed some heavy-duty mathematics, which requires first an expensive statistician and then a hypothesis to test and which tends to introduce new complications when trying to explain your results to others.

Having determined your best operating envelope from process history, GPC creates a real-time model complete with graphical operator interface for process operator guidance and an OPC Client to link to your DCS or historian to keep your process operating in the best operating envelope you have chosen far into the future.

Watch this webinar from September 2019 to discover how GPC unifies process control, quality control, KPI achievement, operating limits and operator alarms into one readily understandable framework. A huge step forward for chemical engineering and you won’t need more than basic maths!

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Process plant control systems capture measurements of thousands of variables as often as every few seconds. These add to a continuously lengthening time-series for each measurement which began when the plant was first started. This data has enormous potential, which is largely untapped by the conventional analysis tools available to most process and control engineers. Fashionable “Big Data” approaches are challenged by process plant data and have limited application for busy engineers since many of the assumptions and simplifications destroy the richness of process data. Geometric Process Control (GPC) – a technology unique to us here at PPCL – avoids these pitfalls and provides engineers with graphical tools to work with datasets spanning their entire plant and create low-cost, equation-free predictive models to develop new process understanding quickly and easily.

This webinar, presented by Dr Alan Mahoney in May 2019, demonstrates our unique approach to analysis on a process with a medium size dataset spanning the process from feed to product, with 750 variables over a year at 10 minute intervals. We discuss how to approach big datasets and explore them visually, using operating envelopes and finding interactions between variables. Covering the entire process including incoming analyses through processing conditions to final quality variables, KPIs and performance variables, GPC enables engineers to explore their data fully and make discoveries that they couldn’t before. We also cover process stewardship, using your discoveries to achieve quality targets and operational excellence long into the future.

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The cost of downtime and degraded production from abnormal events is a major cost in the process industry. Giving your operators additional warning of situations such as column flooding, valve failure or equipment fouling can dramatically reduce production losses. Traditional condition monitoring and fault detection models are time consuming and expensive to create and maintain. Here we present a simple, low-cost method based on process history which can be implemented by a trained engineer in a matter of hours.

C Process Modeller, PPCL’s real-time process monitoring software, provides faster, earlier detection of faults against a standard benchmark. This webinar introduces our unique and innovative Geometric Process Control (GPC) technology and demonstrates its application to a standard process benchmark for fault-detection techniques, the Tennessee Eastman process, looking at case studies from real process plants.

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