Success Stories
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- Tuning
A Stable Process is a Profitable Process
Engineers in the Basic Materials market understand the value of Set Point tracking as a means of controlling business-critical production processes. Simply put – better Set Point tracking results in improved disturbance rejection and more consistent product quality. That makes for safer and more profitable production, and Control Station’s LOOP-PRO is making that possible.
Automating Control and Reducing the Cost of Manual Intervention
The best time to visit the local zoo is early in the morning around feeding time. That’s when the animals are out and about, and it’s when they showcase their wild side. Although fun to experience while on vacation, this type of wild behavior is anything but acceptable in a manufacturing facility. Wild is unstable and unsafe. It’s unprofitable.
Watering Down Production for Increased Profits
Tightening control around Set Point will improve the performance and profitability of most every production process. This is especially true of drying processes applied by ethanol manufacturers to control moisture content. With reduced variability, ethanol producers are capable of improving quality and reducing energy consumption.
Are Your Tunings Refined?
ConocoPhillips, a recognized leader in the petrochemicals industry, faced a dilemma at their Bayway Refinery. Oscillation in a critical steam flow loop persisted in spite of relentless efforts to stabilize it. The loop was vital to one of the refinery’s distillation columns and its inefficiency was resulting in significant energy loss. Although refinery staff used multiple software tools to assist with diagnosis and optimization, the loop’s oscillatory behavior prevented those tools from producing an accurate model of the process and thwarted tuning.
Maximizing Production and Profits Through Improved Process Control
Magnesium Elektron’s (MEI) profits were being heavily impacted by an inability to control a critical production process. Excessive oscillation in the Chiller at their Flemington, New Jersey production site had cost MEI hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. In spite of best efforts to stabilize process temperature within acceptable tolerances, the company’s operations staff were unable to establish the necessary level of control.
Improving Control Can Be So Sweet!
Chocolate is a nearly $100 Billion global business. As may be expected the process of transforming raw cacao beans into its many tasty confectionery forms is complex. In particular, the tempering process takes chocolate through a precisely controlled temperature curve that involves the raising followed by the lowering of the product’s
temperature.
Chemicals: Facilitating Decision-Making with Data
Mechanical issues can often go undetected for long periods of time, all the while negatively affecting a facility’s production throughput and efficiency. Although the responsibility of engineering staff is to root out and resolve such mechanical problems, they sometimes require multiple forms of proof before accepting the presence of poor process behavior.
Powering Up with Automatic Control
Electricity is an everyday necessity and while power generation is a $400 Billion industry in the US alone the availability of electricity is regularly taken for granted by consumers. Interestingly, power companies are often forced to err on the side of suboptimal control in order to assure availability of the electricity they generate.
Food & Beverage: Avoiding Issues with Actionable Reporting
While some PID controllers can operate loosely most control loops have strict limits within which they have to operate. That can be especially true for controllers deployed in the Food & Beverage sector. Tight control is often essential to maintaining high quality standards and to satisfying the requirements of industry regulators.
