Real-Time Condition Monitoring for Heat Exchangers with IIoT

 

Customer Benefits

• Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions for easily and cost-effectively improve visibility into the health of your heat transfer equipment.
• Simple monitor long-term heat exchanger performance continuously to boost energy efficiency and reduce costs.
• Improve unit utilization and maintaining product quality.

Introduction
A heat exchanger is used to transfer heat between two or more fluids, typically used in both cooling and heating processes. Hundreds of tubes and shell heat exchangers can typically be found in a refinery operating on a continuous basis that are important to operational efficiency. Although most process heat exchangers are installed with a margin of design heat exchange capacity, gradual fouling of the exchanger surfaces lowers the effectiveness of heat transfer, requiring more fuel to be burned in the process heaters and more heat rejected to the environment. 

Operators thrive to search for a better way to assess the performance of heat exchangers. Their performance can vary, so how do you correlate it to operating cost or energy savings? This is an important matter as this will determine whether a process shutdown is needed for cleaning the heat exchanger or if operation can continue until a turnaround or a planned shutdown. 

The Challenge
The performance of heat exchangers degrades with time due to fouling or deposition of material on the heat transfer surface. The fouling of critical ex-changers in manufacturing plants can cause a significant cost impact in terms of production losses, energy efficiency, and maintenance costs. While most plants monitor their exchangers to a certain degree, the ability to effect real and sustainable improvements requires four essential components: (1) real time monitoring; (2) an pre-warning mechanism; (3) the ability to detect the cause of fouling; and (4) the ability to treat the cause in order to slow the degradation.

The Solution
Adding IIoT sensors to continuously monitor the effectiveness of process heat exchangers is cost-effective and simple to implement. Many process heat exchangers were installed with only thermo wells rather than temperature measuring elements. Now the refinery can add wireless temperature measuring sensors to monitor long-term heat exchanger performance. By monitoring and trending the inlet and outlet temperatures, operators have a better view to heat exchanger performance. Apart from temperature and vibration, Yokogawa's Sushi Sensors can also monitor process pressure.

JOIN offers an open IIoT platform that monitors, predicts, and diagnoses heat exchanger performance. The unique features of this advanced IIoT technology include: numerous data cleaning steps to improve data quality and isolate a net fouling trend, an adaptive model which learns from the past, and knowledge-based diagnostics offered by Perfact which identify the probable cause(s) of fouling and recommend corrective actions. 

Results
By monitoring and use of analytics using the data of the IIoT sensors, operators have a better view to heat exchanger performance. Problems such as fouling will be visible over time if they occur. By applying JOIN, contamination gets visible due to anomalies that are detected at an early stage. The condition information becomes directly available on the dashboard and the performance of assets is displayed in real time, all directly after the startup of the plant. The user is informed in advance and appropriate measures can be taken to avoid future damage or dangerous situations. Also, in case of a sudden change, there will be an alarm given.

The JOIN program offers an easily and cost-effective solution, providing operators visibility to long-term heat exchanger performance. Greater insight enables operators to attain maximum energy efficiency for lower fuel usage and energy costs. Operating within heat transfer and hydraulic capacity limits ensures greater unit utilization and product quality.