Strategically positioned in Bathinda, Punjab, HMEL’s Guru Gobind Singh refinery is an industrial anchor for the economic development of northern India. It sits at the northern terminus of a 1,017-km pipeline from Mundra, Gujarat, on India’s west coast, where tankers deliver the refinery’s raw inputs from abroad.
Formed in 2007 as a public-private partnership joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (HPCL, a government of India enterprise) and Mittal Energy Investments Pte. Ltd. (MEIL) of Singapore, HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd. (HMEL) broke ground on the new refinery in 2008 and commenced operations in 2012. From the start, process automation had been at the heart of HMEL’s strategic vision of building a smart refinery. Leveraging the latest technology and partnering with the best helps the organization to deliver superior operational performance and profitability with strict adherence to environmental and safety standards. And at $5 billion USD, the 225,000-bpd refinery represents Punjab’s largest capital investment at a single location, and features a who’s who of technology licensors and partners—from UOP to IBM and SAP.
But if Krishan Tuteja, VP-Operations & Maintenance, has his way, they’ll be adding FCG to that list of acronyms on the company’s website. Indeed, the Guru Gobind Singh refinery credits FieldComm Group technologies with increasing company margins by $25M USD annually, and has just been named the 20th annual winner of Plant of the Year honors by the FieldComm Group. Each year, the leading standards development organization for process instrumentation recognizes an end-user company for exceptional and innovative use of the organization’s FDI, Foundation Fieldbus and HART technologies in real-time applications that improve operations, lower costs and increase availability. HMEL’s implementations accomplish all three.
“In our endeavor to maximize value creation, we continuously look to improve our processes, including more high value end-products, and pursue opportunities to expand our business,” explains Jatinder Kansal, Assistant General Manager, Instrumentation, who is responsible for implementing advanced analytical communication protocols. “As a young and technology-driven organization, HMEL moves swiftly to respond to the ever-changing energy market. Working with the communities around us, we aspire to build an organization that would shape a bright energy future for the country.”
Realizing the Industrial IoT
In addition to investments in state-of-the-art process automation, WirelessHART implementations at HMEL fall into the category of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and are part of a framework that HMEL calls the Digital Refinery of the Future. These use cases include using wireless sensors to track the sounds made by steams traps and valves, the temperature and vibration signatures of fin fan heat exchangers, and even the real-time location of plant personnel.
Leveraging the data from WirelessHART acoustic sensors from Emerson has allowed HMEL to monitor 138 control valves and pressure safety valves across eight refinery units for the passing of hydrocarbons. This can help to proactively manage environmental issues, advance the realization of odorless operations and recover the value of hydrocarbons that would otherwise be lost to flaring. The associated management application, part of Emerson’s Plantweb Insight offering, can alert personnel to issues via persona-based email notifications.
Steam traps, too, make different noises when they’re working than when they’re not. HMEL is also using WirelessHART-based acoustic sensors to monitor 23 steam traps across the FCC unit; stuck traps are flagged for fixing to control energy losses. Performance monitoring of 16 critical fin-fan heat exchangers draws on the wireless data created by magnet-mounted vibration probes as well as clamp-on-style temperature transmitters with surface-contacting RTDs. Five temperature transmitters and two probes per fan can detect and diagnose inefficiencies and emerging malfunctions before they escalate into an equipment outage.
Finally, field personnel at the fluidized catalytic cracking (FCC) unit are fitted with active RFID tags that a network of 66 location anchors and gateways can resolve to within 10 meters.
The associated Plantweb Insight application can monitor the employee head count within the monitored area, alert when personnel cross into or out of their designated zone and facilitate safety mustering. And by pushing a safety alert button on their RFID tag, an employee can inform personnel that help is needed—and the system knows just where to find them.
