BP installs Smart Wireless at its refineries

BP has expanded its Cherry Point Washington refinery applications and installed Smart Wireless at its tank farm in its Naperville, Illinois, research and development facility.

BP Cherry Point is a 225,000 bpd refinery and is the largest supplier of calcined coke to the aluminium industry.

One out of every six aluminium cans is made using BP Cherry Point's calcined coke.

Emerson's Smart Wireless installation on the refinery's calciner unit monitors bearing and calciner coke temperatures to help prevent fan and conveyor failure.

Fans can cost more than USD100,000 to repair but, more importantly, can be down for up to 10 days with associated production losses.

The 15-transmitter wireless installation was installed in 2006 and continues to operate reliably while eliminating operator rounds in the field.

Cherry Point has expanded wireless use to 35 transmitters, including tank farm and utility applications and installation of a Smart Wireless gateway in the diesel unit to make it ready for wireless motes.

Michael Ingraham, technical manager for Cherry Point refinery, said: 'Wireless enables us to get more data more efficiently and economically than we have been able to in the past.

'A second facility, BP Naperville research and development, includes a modernised tank farm feeding an expanding number of pilot plants that develop processing technology options for BP refining worldwide.

'Following the first application of Smart Wireless at BP's Cherry Point refinery, BP installed a 45-transmitter wireless network at the Naperville tank farm.

'Operational for about one year, this has provided strong operational experience and a platform for testing the technology, leading to significant take-up of wireless at other BP refineries throughout the world.

Another BP representative said: 'The wireless devices allow our operators to be more efficient, collecting data from one central point as opposed to walking around the tank farm and recording all the values.

'The other advantage of the wireless devices is that they supply data continuously for recording in our historian, allowing us to see what is happening in the tank farm at any time of the day.

The Naperville wireless network uses Rosemount wireless transmitters to monitor suction and discharge pressures, levels, flow and temperatures.

New wireless functions are installed as they become available and emphasis is on collaboration with Emerson to expand the capabilities as rapidly as possible to cover refinery-wide applications.

The real-world environment, in a pilot-scale operation, provides feedback to Emerson and hands-on experience for refinery management.

Options for refinery process optimisation and sharing of wireless automation technology are thereby shared globally by the refining technology team.

Mark Howard, commercial technology manager for BP, said: 'Wireless is an important enabler for refinery of the future technologies.

'It helps us deploy the sort of instrumentation, sensors and analytical devices that we need for condition monitoring to support predictive maintenance, tracking feedstocks through the value chain and a host of other applications.

'Wireless is a very important vehicle for getting instrumentation into places where wired devices would be too expensive or frankly not very practical.

'Looking ahead, we support the move towards standards such as Wirelesshart.

'We like being able to access new wireless transmitters as quickly as we can deploy them and we're getting very good robust operation.

John Berra, president of Emerson Process Management, said: 'Smart Wireless was conceived through years of research and development, which led to Emerson's pioneering introduction to the market in 2006.

'Key in this effort was the parallel pioneering effort by BP in their trial mesh installation of Smart Wireless at Cherry Point in that same year.

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