Evaluation of control valves

A

Thread Starter

Arquimides Medina

Hello list members.

I am interested on getting your feedback about the guidelines that should be used to determine when to remove a control valve for maintenance during an oil refinery turnaround or a planned plant stoppage. The extra heavy oil Upgrader where I work has been running for almost three years and the next turnaround will be by the end of 2003. We have throttling,on off (ball or butterfly types) and self operated control valves installed in crude, coker, wet gas recovery, nafta, sulfur recovery, amine, sour water treatment, etc. plants.

Best regards,
AJMB
 
J
Remove only valves that need to be removed for maintenance. Continuously monitor valve health while the valves are online. From time to time perform valve diagnostics and performance analysis with the valve still in place. Tests such as step response, partial valve stroking, and comparison of valve signature etc. will be useful. This requires use of smart (HART) or FOUNDATION(tm) Fieldbus valve positioners, networking to bring the data to the host computers, and an online asset management software to process and display this data in a comprehensible way. This may require some major changes or additions to your current control architecture. We (SMAR) make this gear. Please contact me off list.

Jonas Berge
==================
[email protected]
www.smar.com
 
Only the experience can tell you when a valve need to be remove for mayor maintenance. There is some expert system that can evaluate the status of the diferent parts of the valve without remove it, like FlowScanner from Fisher. this system run some test on the valve and produce graphics of its behavior so you can evaluate the performance for every component.

The latest tecnology of control valve have this evaluation system inside so you only need to connect to the electronic (Hart, fieldbus, etc) to obtein the diagnostics
 
Top