Processing, April 2020

PROCESS AUTOMATION P r o c e s s h i s t o r i a n s e n a b l e Historians provide the data storage secure connectivity and built in tools required for implementation of digital transformation initiatives By Nick Cross and Ma Haoran Yokogawa igital transformation is a goal for all process plant operators worldwide because of the bene ts delivered in terms of greater throughput improved quality reduced D maintenance expenses lower energy use and other operational improvements The first steps toward digital transformation are digitizing as much plant data as possible and then storing this data where it can be easily and securely accessed by different software platforms each of which are used to improve plant operations Much of the desired data is already digitized using various sensors instruments and analyzers Other data can be digitized by converting manual pen andpaper data entry methods to more automated procedures Ideally these procedures can be fully automated such that data ows directly to a storage system but partial automation where data ows from handheld tablets to a storage system is another possibility As mentioned improving plant operations by means of making the right data available to various software platforms is the goal These software platforms include the basic process control system BPCS asset management software maintenance management software enterprise resource planning systems and others Here are the main options for storing the digitized data produced by these software platforms Data storage options Relational databases are widely used in all sorts of non production applications by most process industry companies but they have many drawbacks for storing digital data from process plants A relational database must be preconfigured for each possible field along with designated relationships among all fields Given the wide variety and complexity of process plant digital data this is a problematic step Even if this step can be accomplished and continuously maintained as new data is added relational databases will often suffer severe performance degradation as the amount of stored data increases primarily because every additional data point requires a new record Due to these and other issues many process plants have started out with relational databases only to seek an alternative more suited to their needs The preferred alternative is a process historian as it is speci cally designed to e ciently store historical data over long periods of time ese types of databases store continuously monitored process plant data such as ows pressures level and temperatures and are therefore capable of handling the types of data typically produced by processes units and procedures eir data storage capabilities are prodigious making them suitable for even the largest plants those continuously historizing hun 48 Processing APRIL 2020 Process plants must implement digital transformation to remain competitive digital transformation Images courtesy of Yokogawa