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Nikhil Chauhan, Chief Strategy Officer, Lummus Digital, throws light on the Value of Digital Twin & Advanced Analytics in Downstream Plants at Downstream USA 2022

Everything happens for a reason. At least within the confines of the refinery and petrochemical plant piping and vessels, this is true. But that reason often isn’t obvious and takes the right combination of skills and tools to reveal it. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to the operations side of the process industry. Armed with those beautiful laws of thermodynamics, I had an opportunity to play detective on a regular basis. 



I recall one particular case involving repeated near misses on exceeding emissions limits from a sulfur plant. At random intervals, the Tail Gas pressure control valve would jump open, releasing Tail Gas to an incinerator and bumping up against the permitted SO2 emissions limits. At the beginning of the investigations, the list of potential causes was practically endless. Was it a problem in the Tail Gas Recycle Compressor? Maybe there was a plug in a Condenser Seal Leg? Was the pressure spike even real at all, or was the pressure control valve responding to a phantom instrument anomaly? 

Starting at the scene of the crime and painstakingly checking every instrument and detail back to the source, after 4 hours I discovered a faulty connection on a temperature transmitter used in the temperature-pressure compensation for the oxygen flow meter feeding the Claus Furnace. This caused a spike in oxygen flow, upsetting the stoichiometric ratio for the catalyst beds downstream, leading to poor conversion and overwhelming the Tail Gas Recycle Compressor.

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Conclusion

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