by Brian Nixon, PAS Alarm Management Engineer

A vital component to fulfilling America's energy needs comes from sources located beneath the ocean. The offshore oil and gas industry exists to service this need. As you can imagine, extracting oil and gas from beneath the ocean is a bit different from extracting oil and gas on land. The iconic images of an oil geyser shooting oil out of the ground would be an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The offshore platforms have to be designed with the utmost respect for safety and the environment. In order to protect these valuable assets many companies have identified Alarm Management as an essential requirement in mitigating abnormal situations and preventing catastrophic losses. 

As offshore platforms are unique, a unique set of training is required prior to any visit. The first component of the training involves getting out to the platform. This is typically done with a helicopter or a boat. Either way, the vessel has to travel over a good deal of water before arriving at the platform. The first component of the training involves how to survive in the water should the worst happen. The water survival course is half classroom lecture and half hands-on experience. The classroom lecture is informative and gives you a good overview of the different personal floatation devices and when to use the different types. It also covers the proper ways to approach a helicopter and how to get on and off a boat in rough seas. In the hands-on portion, you're allowed to get your feet wet, literally. Everyone dons their Flame Resistant Clothing (FRC) and jumps into the pool. In the pool, you practice the proper ways to get into a life raft from the water, how to use your FRCs as a floatation device, and how to group together with your fellow floaters to make it easier to be spotted for a rescue. 

 

After these lessons, one of the more daunting parts of the training occurs: Helicopter Underwater Egress Training (HUET). In HUET training, you're strapped into a helicopter chassis, dunked underwater, turned upside down, and forced to find your way out. If you've travelled in a number of different airplanes, you may have noticed there are a lot of different types of emergency exits. Some involve more levers and handles than others. In HUET training, you're given the opportunity to practice with several different types of emergency exits available on helicopters. These range from simple "push-out" windows, to more extravagant designs involving levers and handles. Upside down in pitch black water is not the time to try to figure out where the emergency latch is on the door. Even the great Houdini practiced his escapes for years before performing underwater escapes in front of an audience. In total, the typical training involves getting dunked about 6 times. The first time is just a test to make sure you're not going to panic. After that, you get the opportunity to try out the different types of emergency exits at different locations in the helicopter simulator. It took about 3 days for me to clear the smell of chlorine out of my nostrils.

 

The second component of the training is learning how to make as little environmental impact as possible. At a conventional facility, litter and trash are fairly easy to clean up. Walk over, pick it up, and place in a trash can. On an offshore platform, anything that goes overboard is not as easy to pick up. The training stresses that if you drop something overboard, the company has to make an attempt to retrieve it as long as it is safe to do so. Explaining to your supervisor that you lost your hardhat over the rail and now someone has to be sent out to retrieve it is not a conversation I'd like to have. The best way to clean up marine debris is to not create it in the first place, and this is stressed during the training.

 

The final component of the training is company specific training. This training provides more emphasis on the specific requirements of the company that operates the offshore platform. The company safety policy, environmental policy, and other such company specific information.

 

Once you've finished the training, a whole new adventure of small floating cities and industrial platforms awaits you. Good luck, and stay dry!

 

The issuance of 18.2 is a significant and important event for the chemical, petrochemical, refining, power generation, pipeline, mining and metals, pharmaceutical, and other industries!  ANSI/ISA18.2 is quite different from the “usual” ISA standard. It is not about specifying how some sort of hardware talks to other hardware, or the detailed design of control components. It is about work processes of people. Alarm management isn’t really about hardware or software; it’s about work practices (poorly performing alarm systems do not create themselves!)

 

 

 

 

 

By Chris Lyden, President of PAS 

Frankly, I had to pause for a moment and collect my thoughts before answering, since this is a fundamental question any client would asks before selecting a strategic technology partner.

Here is my answer in summary:

PAS’ roots are in the control room. More than eighty percent of our engineers come from end-user companies. We have a number of former operators on our team. Eddie and I both spent many years training process operators, developing and commissioning control systems and spending our fair share of time in various industrial control rooms. We live and breathe operations. It is who we are. It’s in our blood.

So why does that make us a better supplier and partner? What does that have to do with the quality of our products, or the relevance of our offerings? Everything!

Our plant operations experience gives us genuine context and more importantly, empathy for our customers. We really have “walked a mile in their moccasins." Years ago, I was in a control room when the cat cracker went into reversal. If you don’t know what that means, trust me, it’s a very bad thing. I didn’t know if I would be alive 10 seconds from now or not. The term “process safety” now has a very different meaning for me than it did before that day. It’s not an abstraction. Only experience can teach that kind of lesson. Many of us at PAS have had our lives changed forever by in-plant experiences like that.

These experiences have changed the way we think. They have caused us to take a fundamentally different approach to our applications than our competitors who come from an IT background.

We focus on safety and production first, and then on systems and data. To some, this may not sound important. But when you put it in context, then it becomes not only important, but also critical.

Take for example dynamic alarming. This is serious business, impacting the operator’s vigilance during the most critical operating periods – process transitions and upsets – and directly impacting plant reliability and personnel safety.

Recognizing that no alarm management solution is complete without the dynamic alarming, who would you trust with your alarm management strategy? The guys with extensive plant operations experience or the IT guys?

By Chris Lyden, President of PAS

Our current vision of ubiquitous wireless sensors is largely enabled by batteries. But, all batteries require periodic replacement and disposal. In fact, even if batteries in industrial sensor networks last five years, the cost to replace and dispose of them is staggering. Some estimates place these costs for already-installed industrial wireless networks at over two billion dollars per year! Energy harvesting technologies such as electro-active polymers and nano-generators may eventually offer solutions to these problems, but not anytime soon. We impatient engineers want a solution right away.

Exciting new super-capacitor technologies being developed by researchers at MIT offer a viable solution to these problems. Repeated charging and discharging of batteries causes them to lose capacity over time, which necessitates their replacement and disposal. An alternative to batteries are capacitors, which are storage devices for electric charge that do not have the same propensity to degrade. Until now however, capacitors have had a major drawback. Their relative size was much larger than a battery of equal capacity. Their footprint was just too big to allow them to serve as a direct replacement.

This is where the MIT technology comes in. They covered the plates of a capacitor with millions of tiny filaments called nano-tubes. Each filament is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair, and collectively they dramatically increase the effective surface area of the capacitor’s plates, allowing them to store more energy in smaller footprint.

By now, you must be asking yourself “Why in the world does anyone at PAS give a hoot about batteries, and sensors, and super-capacitors?” Well, these technologies are very likely to create substantial increased demand for our Integrity software. Here’s why.

Historically, there has been a mutually reinforcing (autocatalytic) relationship between the number of installed I/O and the number of applications running in a plant. As I/O costs decline, justification of new applications that use I/O becomes easier. More installed applications in-turn drive demand for I/O. The anticipated, broad proliferation of low-cost wireless measurements, enabled by our nano-tube super-capacitors and other breakthroughs, will most likely drive many new applications.

PAS’ concept of Automation Genome™ mapping is in a very real sense the result of years of growth in measurements and applications. The essence of the concept is that the building blocks of modern automation systems (i.e. points, parameters, registers, bits, display elements, etc.) are the electronic analogue to DNA and genes in organic life forms. However, unlike organic life forms whose genomes morph slowly over very long periods of time, automation genomes morph daily as loops are tuned, alarms are disabled, and parameters are changed. Also unlike the genomes of organic life forms, automation genomes often share their “genetic material” (parameters) with other, foreign automation systems (species) creating an inter-related, collective genome that is the sum of the parameters of all interoperating systems.

Changes in the genome of one system often propagate to the other inter-connected systems, creating configuration mismatches. For example, a change to a register in a safety instrumented system would likely create mismatches on several graphic displays, the DCS control logic, and the historian too. So, as the level of interconnectivity between installed systems, the number of integrated measurements and, the number of applications all increase, the automation genome of the plant becomes incredibly complex. Mapping and managing this dynamic complexity becomes untenable for mere mortals.

PAS’ Integrity software is the answer to this problem. It’s the only product in the market that maps dissimilar genomes into a common, collective genome. As the number of measurements and genome complexity increases, the market demand for Integrity will increase with them. That is why we care about nano-tube super-capacitors.