Feature

Facilitating Net Zero Environmental Impact

Posted on 27 January, 2010 | Tags: Sustainable Practices

At Rockwell Automation sustainability is serious business and the company has made strides in the field of providing sustainable solutions for multitude of industries since the time when this word was a vogue. Som Chakraborti, Business Director, Process Automation along with John Watts Manager Process Solutions, Asia Pacific discuss the key role PlantPAX system, offered by Rockwell would help the industry to adopt sustainable practices to tackle the issues chemical industry is grappling with.

Even when the industry had not progressed to meet the challenges in terms of diminishing energy resources, water scarcity and emissions, sustainability appeared as a buzzword in the industry circles repeatedly. Owing to rising energy and raw material costs, this buzzword driven earlier by regulations is now an imperative.
Definition of sustainability has gone beyond the impact on environment and having green energy efficiency program. It is an operational matrix where all the people and organization is accountable for the progress of the initiative towards mitigation of overall negative impact on the environment. The initiative should encompass variety of areas from environment to energy optimization, plant and personnel safety.
" Sustainability is not something that needs to be limited only to a company's annual report," says Som Chakraborti, Business Director, Process Automation, Rockwell Automation. However, increasing awareness and customer's responsibility would affect the industry by large and compel the businesses to develop innovative approach towards sustainability.
Energy management, solvent recovery, optimum use of raw materials and recycling are some of the prevailing issues pertaining to the global manufacturing industry. "Though a company may be successful in reducing its energy bills, but usage of fossil fuels for energy generation will still leave a negative carbon footprint," points out John Watts, Manager, Process Solutions, Asia Pacific with Rockwell Automation. "Having said that, ultimately sustainability is about having net zero positive effect on the environment," he adds.
Automation will play a crucial role during the years to come and help manufacturers address these issues and concurrently adopt sustainable production practices. Technologies will facilitate the organizations to set the parameters well ahead of time, save cost and enhance efficiencies. Besides, monitoring the processes will help the manufacturer have a closer look to unveil hidden opportunities. This would be a win-win situation for the manufacturer to produce more with lesser or same amount of resources, monitor emissions and ensure plant and personnel safety, which ultimately would help the company improve its bottom line.

Challenge Status
"Rockwell had made noteworthy advancements in the field of sustainability, much before the industry had adopted this term," comments Chakraborti. Company's sustainability program encompasses the areas of energy optimization, environment management and safety beyond processes. Energy optimization solutions enable to tie up various aspects of manufacturing in a systematic manner and respond to the variable production demand. Rockwell's power and energy management packaged solutions are fairly horizontal and may be applied to multitude of industries. Nevertheless, chemical industry will be one large consumer of these solutions.
Chemical industries worldwide are facing the challenge of variability in the area of emission management. But particularly the industries, where carbon trading is becoming a serious subject, emission data must be tracked. Rockwell acquired Pavilion Technologies, best known for process optimization to strengthen company's environment management arm. Pavilion technology makes it possible for the manufacturer to optimize any operational parameter that has variability and reduce it as per operational law. This helps the producer to look into the trading balance sheet more effectively and link it with the operational goal.
Plant and personnel safety is precedence for the chemical industry and Rockwell's Safety Instrument Systems (SIS) offer whole spectrum of safety solutions to address sustainability goals of the end user. The solutions facilitate the machine and equipment safety of very critical processes even in hazardous areas that cannot be shut down abruptly instead done in a controlled way.  Rockwell has achieved the position of world leader in offering safety solutions with acquisition of ICS Triplex, a leading manufacturer of SIS.

Transforming Control Systems into Business Tools
Unprecedented downturn has resulted in downfall of some of the world's most dominant industry players, which has emphasized the need for the business operators to function in a transparent manner in order to cut down the associated risks. Over the years, role of automation has also changed from conventional process control to advanced process control that can be integrated with the company's day-to-day operations. Though India has not seen the same level of decline as the other matured economies, nevertheless pressure was there, but there is a positive trend on all these fronts. The end users look at meeting their sustainability objectives through technology support from automation solution providers. 
Control system touches plant to a large extent because of the instrumentation, that goes from one end of the plant starting from handling raw materials at preliminary stages of the manufacturing process till the finished goods roll out. This makes ample information available from operational and production perspectives that may be used effectively towards optimizing overall plant operations. Conventionally the industries have been using Distributed Control System (DCS) for process control applications and Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) for discrete and interlocking applications for plants. Contemporary control systems are based on convergence of different technologies into a single platform that offers advantage of using control systems as business tools.
The trend of using technological trains like wireless technology, convergence of business and IT systems such as Ethernet into plant environment is greater than ever for reliability and safety of overall plant operations.  " India is definitely not going to be on top of the list if you compare safety initiatives taken by the global manufacturing industry," Watts points out. "But what is going to change again is the ability of Indian manufacturers to operate in global environment where the demand of these manufacturers and customers will create the pressure on manufacturers to make these investments towards safety and process reliability of manufacturing process for sustainable supply chain," he adds.

Integrated Plant Architecture for Advanced Process Control
Rockwell's innovative plantwide automation system, PlantPAX encompasses variety of areas right from environment to energy optimization to plant and personnel safety. The manufacturer can manage complete set of operations right from upstream, raw material handling to processing and downstream logistics operations with one system. Across the globe, various heavy industries have already migrated their operations to PlantPAX, Rockwell's Distributed Control System (DCS) platform. Increasing consumer demand will drive the growth of these solutions for variety of plantwide applications in the chemical industry.
PlantPAX is based on some of the proven technologies around plantwide automation, which is a challenge for any traditional DCS supplier. The system comes with distinct advantages of inherent scalability and distribution of automation across the plant irrespective of the scale of plant. These are the two key operative words for PlantPAX system that offer the flexibility to apply the technology over wide cross section of chemical and other manufacturing industries ranging from few hundreds to thousands I/O points. 
From operations perspective there is a need of process automation system to communicate with the business systems. Open protocols is one of the attributes of Rockwell offerings and central to this system that makes communication of DCS for plant maintenance and back office business systems much easier with the plant automation system. One primary example is Ethernet that has been applied to process industry for number of years. Rockwell has developed Ethernet IP, an unmodified version of the conventional system that allows complete enterprise to run on one common network.
Wide portfolio of PlantPAX system offers advanced process control that ranges from highly sophisticated models to combination of built in regulatory control in the system. The system offers the manufacturer flexibility to create cost effective options according to the complexity of application. This also helps to support the problem of variability in the process to support optimization.
There is a trend of convergence of networking protocols and associated infrastructure between IT and plant floor environments. "Gradually, the role of enterprise IT shall increase in the selection and management of process system," observes Chakraborti. Rockwell has been able to drive this across multiple industries from automation perspective.

Migrating to Contemporary PlantPAX System  
Obsolete technologies limit the ability of the manufacturer to use the new technologies such as advanced process control, business control and information management systems to improve overall plant performance. Moreover the users find it difficult to manage the older systems due to unavailability of auxiliaries or prohibitive costs. PlantPAX is DCS with extended capabilities that can be applied to multitude of industries. The company has developed suite of migration tools that allow the user to switchover from the old DCS systems to Rockwell's legacy system in a phased manner. Migration tools allow the user to move from operator station to open networking PlantPAX station operation environment keeping investment in control and maintaining control system legacy. 
" The only challenge that we are facing currently is that not every customer is prepared or has invested in open network, so we end up with complexity of open network from Rockwell Automation as well as legacy of proprietary networks that the customer may have invested in," says Chakraborti. " Their expectation is that our system executes and performs in conjunction with the existing systems", he adds.  
Every project has its own complexities and variations and there are challenges in terms of how best to optimize a given network for plantwide and vertical communication from the business system to the control system. "Outdated documentation, understanding control operation are some of the problems that we encounter most often," says Sandeep Redkar, Global Process Technical Consultant. Adequate groundwork requires to be done prior to initiating the project for error free replication of functional part of DCS into the new system, without production losses in least possible system, which is a very big challenge that automation suppliers come across. Rockwell has executed several such projects as per the customer's specification, some of which have been executed in record time.
Well disciplined practices and network services group executes the job to optimize a given network for plantwide and vertical communication from business system to control system. Rockwell offers a core set of application-oriented services and customized training for operation of process and maintenance engineers. The full suite of after market services ranges from rendering support to remote sites and on site support should there be the need of additional configurations, expansions or training.

Way Forward 
While it is important to maintain the profitability and manage assets in a business activity, it is important to ensure maximum ROI on current investments. Rockwell is building competency in the field of asset management and reliability, which is relatively new to the Indian market. They have series of offerings around performing audit of present assets in place, putting asset management disciplines in place to maximize utilization and uptime, maintain reliability and guide the customer on the next set of priorities.
Sustainable practices are no longer a vogue, rather taken seriously. "Green component is immensely significant for brand equity," says John. Though sustainability comes with a cost, sooner or later a stage may come when those with legitimate sustainable business goals would get preferential treatment. There are direct benefits and the way to ensure the effectiveness is by measuring it. "Perhaps a stage may come where industries would have sustainability as the criteria for decision making," concludes Chakraborti.
- Mittravinda Ranjan