Yokogawa periodically publishes the Yokogawa Technical Report, which contains articles that take a detailed look at the technologies employed in Yokogawa's products. At this site you will find links to all of the reports that have been published since 1997 as well as links to PDF files containing the full text of selected articles from each issue.
VigilantPlant Services
Facing the Challenge !
- Yokogawa to be a lifetime solution partner -
- Simon Lam Chung Kai*1
*1 : Consultant to CEO of Yokogawa Electric Corporation Former Venture Director of Shell Eastern Petrochemical Complex
VigilantPlant Services to be a Customers' Lifetime Partner for Operational Improvements
- Yasunori Kobayashi*1
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
Since its foundation in 1915, Yokogawa Electric Corporation has developed many innovative and high-quality industrial automation (IA) systems and products as an instrumentation and measurement supplier, using technologies in the areas of measurement, control, and information, and has been supplying them to the global market. Yokogawa has accumulated a wealth of service experience and expertise through the selection, implementation, expansion, modification, and maintenance of IA systems and products, which are invaluable for customers' operational improvements. Recently, Yokogawa has launched a new comprehensive suite of services, VigilantPlant Services, to be a customers' lifetime partner for operational improvements, providing IA systems and products combined with in-depth know-how. This paper introduces the features and specific services of VigilantPlant Services.
Plant Operation Diagnoses by Comparative Effectiveness Analysis Focusing on System Effectiveness
- Hiroshi Shimizu*1
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
Industrial automation (IA) systems and products used in plants are fundamental infrastructure for realizing ideal plant operation. Yokogawa's Comparative Effectiveness Analysis helps customers achieve this by identifying new challenges for improving operations through the automatic acquisition and calculation of various effectiveness indexes of system utilization, and the comparisons with past data, data of other in-house plants and even data of competitors' plants. The first system supported is CENTUM series integrated production control system considering ease of acquiring necessary data. This paper outlines the service for the CENTUM series and the results for 2009 and 2010.
Yokogawa Management Seminar for Top Management of Plants
- Yasunori Kobayashi*1
- Shin-ichi Nagai*1
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
Yokogawa has recently launched a new suite of services called VigilantPlant Services to promote customers' operational improvements throughout the lifecycle of a plant. Yokogawa Management Seminar, an element of its introductory Opportunity Identification Services, is a brainstorming seminar where managers from the customers' plants gather with those from Yokogawa to discuss how to solve issues in plant operation such as human resources, organization, budget or motivation to improve the situation. More than 100 executives have already participated in the seminar which has been held five times in Asian countries, and the participants have found the group discussions to be particularly valuable.
- Takashi Naito*1
- Tatsuho Honda*2
- Shiro Higashiyama*3
- Vladimir Komissarov*4
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
*2 : Sales Engineering Division, Industrial Solutions Business Headquarters
*3 : MA & Market Development Center, YEI
*4 : Yokogawa CIS Ltd. Technical Division
The Moscow refinery of JSC (Joint Stock Company) Gazprom Neft in Russia decided to migrate its existing production control systems including safety instrumented systems, as a part of a large-scale modernization project. The refinery was operated from about 40 distributed control rooms of different sizes. Although consolidating these was expected to improve safety and efficiency, many problems were faced when creating a road map to the target. The Moscow refinery therefore decided to apply Yokogawa's Master Planning to solve them and to conduct a preliminary study. After a five-month study, Yokogawa created a profitable migration plan for the production control systems, ensuring safety and feasibility throughout the course until the completion of consolidation. The improvements to production efficiency and work efficiency are expected to yield sufficient profits.
Improvement Leader Development Program for Driving Improvement Activities
- Hiroaki Tanaka*1
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
Improvement activities with a quick return on investment are attracting attention to increase global competitiveness. The leaders who facilitate such activities must have extensive knowledge and experience, and yet there are fewer opportunities to obtain these in modernized plants. Yokogawa has developed the Improvement Leader Development Program to train such leaders, in which participants learn about improvement methodologies and know-how through virtual on-the-job training with a dynamic simulator. This report describes the outline and objectives of the Improvement Leader Development Program.
- Ng Kok Chu*1
- Koji Ueda*2
*1 : Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore (Private) Limited
*2 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
Proper alarming is critical for safe and stable plant operations. Along with the progress of control systems, alarms can be easily created for various conditions compared with the era when alarms were indicated and consolidated on a panel consisting of a series of annunciators. However, numerous nuisance alarms can overwhelm the operators. This report outlines Yokogawa's Alarm Rationalization and introduces an application example where nuisance alarms were reduced by 66% and safer and more stable plant operation was thus achieved.
- Michio Hoshikawa*1
- Hiroaki Sugita*1
- Kikuharu Arai*2
- Takashi Inoue*3
*1 : Production Department, EHIME PLANT, NIPPON A&L INC
*2 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
*3 : Start-Up Department, Solution Engineering Center, Global Engineering Business Headquarters
Recently, standardization of procedural automation of manual operations has been promoted mainly by the International Society of Automation (ISA). As a leader in this area, Yokogawa released the operation efficiency improvement package, Exapilot, which integrates the expertise of skilled operators into automatic sequences and operational guidance for the first time in the world. Yokogawa has since gained much experience of many applications in various industries. To utilize Exapilot know-how to help customers operate their plants effectively, Yokogawa has launched a new service called "Best Practice Pilot." By applying it to a continuous polymerization process in the Ehime plant of NIPPON A&L INC., the project dramatically shortened the start-up time and reduced manual operations. This report outlines the Best Practice Pilot and its application to the polymerization process.
Control Room Design for Efficient Plant Operation
- Takashi Naito*1
- Naoto Takano*2
- Eiichirou Inamura*2
- Abdelmoumene Hadji*3
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
*2 : Design Planning Dept., Corporate Planning Headquarters
*3 : Yokogawa France
The control room is where operators perform plant operations using control systems every day, and a safe, comfortable, and functional environment helps operators to run the plant more efficiently. The control room must therefore be designed accordingly. Yokogawa has been designing control rooms for various industries for over 30 years. Taking an example of the layout for operator consoles in a consolidated control room, this paper looks at Yokogawa's Control Room Design service.
- Takayuki Aoyama*1
- Keiichi Nishiyama*2
*1 : Kashima Plant Maintenance and Engineering Department, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation
*2 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
Digitized field devices provide a large amount of information, requiring users to identify important information among the many alarms and events and to suppress unnecessary device alarms. Yokogawa's Field Digital Device Diagnostics service, one of the services of Plant Asset Effectiveness Optimization Services InsightSuiteAE, solves these issues. This service includes the Field Asset Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Report which visualizes the state of health of field devices by using data in Plant Resource Manager (PRM), and Baseline Tuning which optimizes the parameters of field devices and PRM for effective operation. This report outlines the Field Digital Device Diagnostics service and introduces its application examples
- Hirokazu Ota*1
*1 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquar
This paper describes a case study of improving the asset performance of ethylene cracking furnaces through energy saving by Yokogawa's Asset Performance Diagnostics service, one of the services of Plant Asset Effectiveness Optimization Services, InsightSuiteAE. During regular maintenance of ethylene cracking furnaces, steam and air are supplied to tubes for decoking to burn and remove coke which may degrade the performance of the furnaces. Steam and air are usually supplied irrespective of the amount of coke deposited in the tubes. However, Yokogawa's Fault Monitoring Diagnostics included in the Asset Performance Diagnostics service can quantify and visualize the amount of deposited coke and can eliminate wasteful steam supply, thus saving energy. Yokogawa is providing maintenance plans based on this solution.
Lifecycle Excellence Services Capable of Improving Productivity and Safety
- Hiroshi Itakura*1
- Yuji Tamura*2
*1 : Marketing Center, Technology Management Division, YFE
*2 : Overseas Business Dept., Global Service Strategy Division, YFE
Yokogawa provides customers with maintenance services to ensure effective maintenance of their plants with optimum cost throughout the plant lifecycle. Recently, Yokogawa has launched its VigilantPlant Services and reorganized its maintenance service system while adding necessary services. The new scheme is capable of visualizing problems in plants, improving the productivity and safety of plants, as well as maintaining plants with optimum cost. The service agreement framework has also been made more attractive. This paper outlines the new maintenance service scheme and its services.
- Hiroshi Isobe*1
*1 : Sales Engineering Division, Industrial Solutions Business Headquarters
The Sodegaura refinery of Fuji Oil Company has long been studying how to create an ideal refinery that can cope with the changing generations of staff due to the mandatory retirement of skilled operators. As a first step, it consolidated its control rooms and updated the control systems in June 2009. Through Refinery Operation Modernization Service, one of its VigilantPlant Services, Yokogawa proposed "an ideal refinery," "consolidation process of control rooms," "an image of the consolidated control room," etc. and worked together to standardize the operation procedures and consolidate the control rooms and control systems. This paper introduces the improvement activities towards an ideal refinery at the Sodegaura refinery and four solutions provided by Yokogawa to solve the customer's problems: solutions for the consolidated refinery production control system, consolidated control room, operation training system, and safety instrumented system for the refinery.
- Hiroshi Itatani*1
- Hiroshi Wakasugi*2
- Daisaku Kimura*3
- Kouji Kitamura*3
- Takamasa Kuramoto*4
*1 : Green Factory Solutions Business Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
*2 : Vigilant Plant Services Center, Industrial Automation Business Headquarters
*3 : Plant Automation System Innovation Team, Production Technology Group, Corporate Technology Administration Department, Kaneka Corporation
*4 : Production Technology Group, Takasago Plant, Kaneka Corporation
The Takasago plant of Kaneka Corporation has been saving energy in various ways. Recently, it adopted Yokogawa's advanced process control (APC) to achieve optimizing control of complex operation patterns in its boiler, steam turbine, and generator (BTG) facilities where most of the energy is consumed. Optimizing control by APC combined with Yokogawa's Exapilot operation efficiency improvement package which automates manual operations helped not only to reduce fuel cost and CO2 emissions but also to save labor.
- Hiroshi Fukumine*1
- Fumiharu Miura*2
*1 : Engineering Dept., Field Solution Division, YFE
*2 : Engineering Dept. III, Sales Engineering Division, Industrial Solutions Business Headquarters
The paper industry is being forced to reduce manufacturing costs in response to market conditions, and so paper companies are restructuring their production systems to boost profitability, save labor, and ensure stable operations and efficient maintenance. Paper machines are essential for paper manufacturing, and their stable operation to meet various product specifications is a major challenge. To meet these market demands, Yokogawa has developed the QCS Tune-up Engineering control parameter optimization service for paper machine quality control systems (QCS). This article introduces applications of the QCS Tune-up Engineering service in which cost has been reduced and quality improved by diagnosing the process control of QCS.
New Products
- Field Instruments Products Based on ISA100.11a Wireless Compliant
- ROTAMASS 3 Series Coriolis Mass Flow and Density Meter
- FVX110 Fieldbus Segment Indicator
- SCADA Software Package FAST/TOOLS R9.03
- Real-time Production Organizer Production Instructor VP
- Lab-Aid V5: Laboratory Information Management System Software
- Production Scheduling Software ASTPLANNER R8.01
- MT6530 Series Wafer Memory Test Systems
- ST6731 FPD Driver Test System for High-speed Interface Test