Incatools blog

Operations managers have many priorities to juggle in their workday. Some of these activities are completing emergency repairs, resolving instrumentation issues, meeting production targets, preparing and presenting reports. When a company purchases a new APC projectit may fall to the bottom of the priority list due to other activities requiring more attention. Why is it important to start APC activities soon after the contract award? What are the convincing arguments for operations managers that will help them move the APC project higher up the priority list and start implementation as soon as possible?

Every operations manager would like to improve the performance of their asset in a safe manner. You need to steer your plant operation through rapid business changes, and maintain products within the specified targets while always maintaining safe plant conditions. Further optimisation of your operation is not feasible with the current tools, and you know that Advanced Process Control (APC) has been successful in making further improvements in similar processes. How do you go about adopting APC for your facility?

Advanced Process Control (APC) carries a raft of benefits. Any competent control engineer can list at least a dozen. That list will often contain only quantitative benefits - emphasizing production yields, feedstock flows, product qualities and the like. There are however also other benefits to advanced process control - benefits less strictly numeric, but nonetheless with a huge impact on operating efficiency.

Leading specialty chemicals company, Lanxess Belgium, noticed the plant wasn’t working at its full potential. Many controllers were underperforming and in manual mode. Due to lack of time, the control engineers ran aground to complete optimization. Read in this blog what benefits they gained by using the INCATools software, or download the case study to discover the process and results.

More than a hundred years ago, Sperry Corporation invented automatic pilot control in airplanes. It was magical and scary at the same time. Nowadays, they can anticipate the exact arrival time, other planes nearby, and the weather forecast. It became unimaginable that our planes would fly without it. APC is the automatic pilot in plants. APC projects can maximize your performance and plant's profit. For decades, the chemical process industry has been working with it. It can benefit smaller plants considerably as well. However, proper PID tuning is the first step in an APC project. It is the foundation for your automatic plant pilot, learn in this blog why.

The key objective for a DCS engineer is to make sure automated operations run as smoothly and as safely as possible. You want to keep the operators as happy as possible - which means keeping the alarms to a minimum and prevent operator interventions. The impact of optimal PID tuning on smooth and safe operations and the number of operator interventions, cannot be overestimated. With a fully-booked schedule, PID tuning is often something that has a lesser priority.

In this blog, we want to explain the impact of the PID tuning on the operator interventions. The first objective of this blog is to put PID tuning higher on the priority list. The second aim is to provide you a way to achieve better tuning within a minimum of time and on a first-time-right principle.