Yokogawa Participates in ARC Forum 2011

Overview

General session

The 15th ARC World Industry Forum was held February 7 to 10 at the Renaissance Orlando Hotel in Orlando, Florida. Over 600 representatives of end users, the media, industry associations, and process industry vendors attended this year’s event. Leadership teams from Yokogawa Electric Corporation and Yokogawa Corporation of America used this opportunity to meet with major customers like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Valero, Dow Chemicals, BP, Shell, BASF, and Bayer.
From the discussions with these people, many of whom were repeat visitors to this annual event, it became apparent that many companies in the process industries are planning to make new investments with the aim of achieving sustainable manufacturing operations.

Under the theme of “Driving Innovation, Sustainability, and Performance,” Yokogawa held a press conference to announce the new FA-M3V PLC and the CombustionONE comprehensive combustion control concept. A CombustionONE showcase table also drew the interest of many customers.

This is the eighth consecutive year that Yokogawa has participated in this forum as a Silver Sponsor. Beginning in 2004, many important Yokogawa IA marketing initiatives such as VigilantPlant®, Safety Excellence, Asset Excellence, Production Excellence, and VigilantPlant Services as well as other initiatives targeting the Real-time Production Organizer™ (RPO), modular procedural automation (MPA), the ISA100 wireless standard, and other topics have been rolled out at this forum.

Press Conference

Chet Mroz, new COO, Yokogawa Corporation of America

At a press conference on the afternoon of February 7 that was attended by over 20 journalists from publications such as Automation, Control, InTech, Automation Management, and Plant Services, Chet Mroz of Yokogawa Corporation of America announced the release of the FA-M3V PLC and introduced CombustionONE. Simultaneously, a press release announcing the FA-M3V was published by Yokogawa Singapore, Yokogawa Middle East, Yokogawa China, and Yokogawa Europe. Featuring the world’s fastest scanning speed, the FA-M3V is clear evidence of Yokogawa’s ceaseless efforts to develop and introduce the most advanced technologies.

The CombustionONE concept of optimizing combustion control in heating furnaces was developed by Yokogawa Corporation of America. At the press conference, Mr. Mroz spoke about how CombustionONE will foster sustainable manufacturing operations by improving combustion efficiency, saving energy, cutting CO2 emissions, reducing maintenance costs, and making heating furnaces safer to operate.

Over 20 editors from industry magazines

Showcase

This demonstration of the CombustionONE concept used the example of a burner management system to show how the Yokogawa TDLS gas analyzer, CENTUM FCS, ProSafe-RS safety instrumented system, and an operation display unit can improve control of the combustion process. The operation display unit showed actual trend data for O2, CO, and CH4 from the test of a heating furnace at a Selas Fluid Processing Corporation plant in Philadelphia.


Yokogawa’s showcase

Track Sessions

Panel discussion at track session

At this year’s forum, Yokogawa arranged for Roja Challa of Reichold to be a panelist in the Remote Operation Management track session, which was held on February 8. Mr. Challa drew from his project experience to make a very convincing presentation on the remote operation capabilities of Yokogawa’s systems, and he also mentioned how he remotely checked and solved a problem with the systems at a Morris Illinois plant in the US while on temporary assignment in India.

And on February 10, Marcus Tenant of Yokogawa USMK and Pete Parker of FRI made a joint presentation for the Modular Procedural Automation track session. In addition to introducing the basic MPA concept, Mr. Tenant spoke about the importance of the ISA106 standard to the process automation field and the benefits that it will bring to customers by allowing them to achieve sustainable manufacturing operations.

Interviews

This year, there were four requests for interviews:

ARC Group, February 8
Managing Automation, February 8
Control Engineering, February 9
Control Magazine, February 9

Both the ARC and the Control Engineering interviews were captured on video and are expected to be broadcast soon. Mr. Mroz and Mr. Challa appeared together in the Control Engineering interview. In the ARC interview, Mr. Mroz emphasized that Yokogawa is a service company that provides comprehensive solutions to its customers.