Biomass is increasingly in the news these days as it is a renewable energy source that can help thermal power plants reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.
Yokogawa systems are used all over the world in all types of power plants, including those that use biomass. Yokogawa measurement and control technologies make it possible for these plants to operate more efficiently and reduce their carbon footprint.
Challenges
Customer Challenge
Improving power plant efficiency
Solution
Yokogawa helps power plants operate more efficiently by improving the control of fuel, steam, and feed water.
Enabling Technologies
CENTUM VP Integrated Production Control System
The CENTUM VP integrated control system secures interruption-free “uptime only” plant performance for optimal productivity and profitability in the renewable energy field.
High level combustion control system (FuzEvent)
The FuzEvent system is the ultimate operator assistant. It optimizes the generation performance while it improves the efficiency of the flue gas treatment.
Customer Challenge
Safely and efficiently starting up boilers, a complicated process that requires considerable skill
Solution
Yokogawa systems make startups safer and more efficient by automating processes such as heating with fuel oil and switching over to biomass fuel. Graphic displays give operators a real-time window into the status of each process.
Enabling Technologies
CENTUM VP Integrated Production Control System
The CENTUM VP integrated control system secures interruption-free “uptime only” plant performance for optimal productivity and profitability in the renewable energy field.
Exapilot Operation Efficiency Improvement Package
Exapilot is an online navigation tool that guides operators step by step through plant operating procedures. Exapilot automates standard operating procedures (SOPs) and provides early detection of process and device abnormalities.
Simulator
High Fidelity, Full-replica Training Simulators
Customer Challenge
Improving combustion efficiency and reducing/eliminating harmful stack emissions
Solution
Yokogawa oxygen analyzers measure the oxygen (O2) concentration in flue gas. With this information, the air-fuel ratio can be adjusted to optimize combustion. Likewise, our stack gas analyzers can be used to reduce harmful emissions by measuring the concentrations of nitrogen oxide (NOX) and sulfur oxide (SOX) in stack gas.
Enabling Technologies
ZR Series Zirconia Oxygen Analyzers
Yokogawa’s zirconia oxygen analyzers are used for combustion monitoring and control applications and are relied on by a wide range of industries to optimize combustion and reduce NOx emissions.
Flue Gas Analyzer
SG1000 stack gas analyzer consists of an infrared gas analyzer unit, a zirconia oxygen analyzer unit, and a sampling unit, and can simultaneously measure up to five components: NOx, SO2, CO2, CO, and O2.
Customer Challenge
Maintaining a constant supply of steam when using a mixture of fuels
Solution
Yokogawa’s control system calculates the optimal fuel mix and adjusts the supply of fuels to stabilize the main steam pressure.
Enabling Technologies
EJX/EJA Series Pressure Transmitters/Differential Pressure Transmitters
The DPharp series of digital pressure transmitters use a differential pressure high accuracy resonance pressure (DPharp) sensor that represents one of the most revolutionary advances in transmitter technology.
CENTUM VP Integrated Production Control System
The CENTUM VP integrated control system secures interruption-free “uptime only” plant performance for optimal productivity and profitability in the renewable energy field.
Exapilot Operation Efficiency Improvement Package
Exapilot is an online navigation tool that guides operators step by step through plant operating procedures. Exapilot automates standard operating procedures (SOPs) and provides early detection of process and device abnormalities.
Details
Biomass Power Generation Process
Biomass plants typically are of the direct combustion, mixed combustion, or gasification type. With the direct combustion power generation method, steam is produced from the heat generated by the burning of materials such as wood waste, agricultural waste, and livestock waste. The steam turns a turbine, which in turn drives a generator that produces electricity. With this method, it is important to secure a stable supply of biomass materials and maintain a uniform moisture content in these materials. The mixed combustion power generation method relies on both biomass and coal to provide a stable flow of electricity. When insufficient biomass fuel is available to power the plant, coal is added. In the gasification power generation method, the biomass is heated to extract combustible gases, which are purified and are then used to power a gas engine or gas turbine to generate electricity.
Control and Measurement Technologies
Plant-wide Systems and Instrumentation | ||
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Information
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Control
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Measurement
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Processes | ||
Fuel Unloading | Boiler | Turbine |
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Flue-Gas Treatment | ||
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Resources
- Yokogawa's CENTUM CS 3000 DCS Monitors and Controls Operations at Poultry Litter-to-energy Plant
- The boiler and turbine startup procedures reduces operator workload and helps to ensure a smooth and safe startup
- Thai SPP uses CENTUM CS 3000 to improve efficiency of Biomass Power Plant
- The burning of the ground rice husks in the boiler's furnace chamber is a complex process that must be carefully controlled
- Complex starting up and shutting down operations of a biomass power plant were automated with CENTUM VP.
- Operator errors and interventions were eliminated in all critical processes.
A manufacturer of lime using an Allen-Bradley Series 5 PLC wanted local data viewing and network connectivity. The PLC was wired directly to a rotary kiln and measured kiln temperature, pressure, rotary speed and material feed rate.
The automation suppliers that will be successful in the long term will be those that effectively address application or industry specific problems for end users with a value proposition that cannot be ignored. These problems exist throughout the process industries today, and they won't be solved by simply offering a product, but through a combination of hardware, software, services, application expertise, and knowledge.
In ARC's view, customers need a compelling business value proposition to justify investment in any kind of automation. Vigilance and VigilantPlant were created with this in mind. Yokogawa's vision with VigilantPlant is to create an environment where plant personnel and operators are well informed, alert, and ready to take action.
This white paper provides an overview of how Yokogawa believes its customers can best prepare for and position themselves to benefit from IIoT-enabled technology and solutions and digitalization in general to emerge as the successful connected industrial enterprises of the future.
Yokogawa’s industrial automation (IA) product and service offerings, industry domain knowledge, and VigilantPlant approach – which emphasizes safe, secure, and uninterrupted operations -- provide a solid foundation for an Industrial Internet of Things that specifically addresses the requirements of process automation, particularly for the OT side of the equation. To be able to provide an equally solid foundation for the IT side, Yokogawa is partnering with Cisco Systems and other industry leaders.
Yokogawa has come a long way in making its message clear to the world of process automation. Last year, the company embarked on a full-scale global marketing campaign to make customers aware of the company's focus on system reliability, security, dependability, and robustness. Dubbed "Vigilance", the campaign created a unified message for the company and greatly helped expand awareness of the Yokogawa brand and corporate philosophy.
Process automation end users are under more pressure than ever to do more with less. The current economic climate means that many automation capital projects are on hold. With capital budgets tighter than ever, users instead focus on operational budgets (where cost cutting is also a key concern), or on automation investments with a very rapid return on investment.
In today's dynamic industrial marketplace, the only constant is change. Raw material costs, energy costs, market demands, environmental and safety regulations, technology, and even the nature of the labor force itself are constantly changing, and not always in predictable directions.
Recently, manufacturing industries are trying to slash the total cost of ownership (TCO). Batch processes are not exceptions. Until recently, in comparison to continuous processes, batch processes have generally not yet undergone systematization and standardization.
As industrial plant systems have increased in scale and their automatic control algorithms advanced, today's operators are required to have more advanced skills and knowledge of theplant systems and to learn the actions to be taken in response to any possible situations including emergencies.
The trend of open system architecture is becoming an important issue with distributed control systems (hereinafter abbreviated as DCSs). To meet this demand, the operation and monitoring functions, and the system generation functions of the CENTUM CS 3000 system are designed to support Windows NT and OLE for Process Control (OPC).
As more fieldbus devices are made practicable, demand is increasing for a distributed control system (DCS) which integrates fieldbus devices in its engineering, operation, and monitoring environments. Conventionally, control has been implemented by the dual-redundant CPUs and control bus within a DCS; however, sufficient reliability must be ensured even when it is distributed over field networks.
The recent increase of devices enabled for a field network such as the FOUNDATION™ Fieldbus is phenomenal. This has been amplifying a requirement for distributed control systems (DCSs) to be capable of constituting a more pliant and efficient production control system by means of flexible connections to field networks in addition to traditional 4 to 20 mA signals.
The environment surrounding process control systems has changed dramatically as the performance of personal computers improves and the Windows operating system advances, there has been a move towards the trend of open architecture. As we are already aware, in addition to the traditional high reliability level and the unique operability there has been an increase in demand for the interoperability of human- machine interfaces (HMI), which are responsible for the operation and monitoring of our distributed control system (DCS).
Drastic changes in the economy of manufacturing industries, has led to increasing demand for plant operations to reduce personnel, improve efficiency, and increase the operation rate of facilities. On the other hand, for plants to operate safely, improvements in reliability and operational safety cannot be neglected.
In this day and age, just simply buying a personal computer, taking it home and turning it on will enable you to be taken to the world of Internet. In such an era, communication connection capability and prospects is increasing in importance. DCSs are no exception for concern.
The manuals of control systems such as a DCS provide a vast amount of information depending on their multi-functionality and functional integration. A conventional large-scale control system our company offers comes with more than 10,000 pages of paper documents.
Yokogawa Electric has been using Pair & Spare method as a reliability-enhancing technology for its line of distributed control systems (DCS) since the release of the CENTUM CS in 1993. As a result, the system has achieved an availability factor of seven 9's (99.99999%) for the record of operation to date.
Improved plant operation efficiency and reduced maintenance costs based on appropriate predictive maintenance are the common objectives that need to be achieved in every manufacturing domain. Exaquantum is positioned above the Process Control System (PCS) layer and gathers and stores huge volumes of process and laboratory data over long terms.
Environmental friendliness (E) must be assessed in today's product design in addition to the conventional design considerations of quality (Q), cost (C), and lead time (D). Hence, the product design system must be urgently restructured in order to minimize the environmental impact of a product throughout its life-cycle from purchase of the materials and parts, through manufacturing and distribution, to use and disposal.
As a company that has strong relationship with nature and provides products using nature's blessings, Mercian Corporation is committed to the environment. Its environmental philosophy is "Mercian thanks nature's blessings and capability that sustain life, and seeks to balance environmental preservation with creating an affluent society."
As for a controller used in a distributed control system (DCS) shown in Figure 1, covering as many applications as possible with a single controller will bring cost reduction effects such as easy engineering and a small controller installation area. Therefore, the controller is required to process large amounts of data more quickly.
Global market pressures are causing businesses world wide to strive to lower manufacturing costs and to become more agile companies in order to quickly respond to changes in market demands and to fend off competitive threats. Yokogawa's customers in all industries and markets are responding to this pressure by working to more closely integrate their plant manufacturing systems with their enterprise wide business systems in a seamless manner.
Recently, standardization of procedural automation of manual operations has been promoted mainly by the International Society of Automation (ISA), and the functional requirements necessary for automation are being studied by the ISA106 committee in the US.
For a coal fired power generation plant (hereafter referred to as "BTG facilities," in which "BTG" stands for boiler, steam turbine, and generator) supplying power to a large-scale production plant, the CO2 emissions from such facilities are a critical issue today.
Due to emerging competitors from the rapidly growing countries such as India and China and the global economic downturn triggered by the Lehman shock, many companies in the process industries are struggling to survive the severe global competition.
Videos
How much do you know about pressure transmitters? Are you accurately, quickly and reliably measuring pressure? Ultimately, the drive of any good pressure transmitter is to get an accurate, reliable pressure measurement to the data user quickly. This video gives you the answers to your basic questions about pressure and pressure transmitters.
News
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