Water & WasteWater asia March / April 2018

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Building the next generation of industrial intelligence

Emerson’s Plantweb™ Insight apps paired with wire less instrumentation lower the cost to entry for customers looking to implement an Industrial IoT strategy.

From left: Brian Joe and Ho Howe Tian

With the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), plants today are able to generate more information

than ever before. However, they often lack the analyt ics and expertise needed to transform the information into actionable data — data that can effectively improve safety, reliability and efficiency of assets, people and processes.

Understanding the importance, Emerson built Plantweb Insight to “turn the raw sensor-based data to actual information for users,” said Brian Joe, global wireless product engineer at Emerson.

What is Plantweb Insight?Emerson’s Plantweb Insight is a suite of applications that helps users to instantly make sense of plant data to drive overall enterprise profitability. It’s a scalable, easy-to-install web-based platform that automatically and strategically interprets plant data.

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From left: Pump Insight Dashboard, Pump Insight Asset Summary

And the beauty of Plantweb Insight? “It’s not industry-specific,” said Joe.

The in-depth monitoring system can be applied to any industry — from water & wastewater, oil & gas, chemical, and refining to food & beverage and life sciences — with data acquired through wireless sensors and existing infrastructure.

“When you look at Plantweb Insight at its core, it’s made up of different core-on-core applications, and each one is focused on different

assets of the plant,” explained Joe.

Why use Plantweb Insight?The power of Plantweb Insight is that it helps to gain real-time insights into abnormal situations.

“The data collected runs through different models and algorithms in order to tell the customer if the assets are healthy or if actions need to be taken,” said Joe.

The secure and reliable software package also allows seamless integration into current infrastructure

to monitor one asset or thousands.

“The keyword here is ‘scalable’,” said Ho Howe Tian, director, Plantweb Digital Solutions, Southeast Asia & Taiwan at Emerson.

According to Ho, the best IIoT adoption strategy for many facilities may be to start small and scale up.

Agreeing to this, Joe said, “We see a lot of people struggle when they start big and try to encompass everything.

“They look at these $ 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 s o f t w a r e platforms and enterprise-typed software platforms. They are beneficial but it’s going to be a system overhaul, which can be

time consuming.”By creating a scalable system, it

is affordable and easy to use as well. But that doesn’t mean customers

can’t start big. Users looking at an enterpr ise-scale can st i l l benefit from Emerson’s Plantweb Insight.

“It depends on the scale of what the customers want. We can start small and scale it up or if you want to start big, no problem. That is the true value of the Plantweb Insight,” said Ho.

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The Singapore team working on Emerson’s Plantweb™ Insight

The data gathered from the sensors are analysed immediately to provide a holistic view of the key assets on the dashboard.

“You do not need someone with 20 years of experience to operate it. Someone with little or no experience can also use and benefit from it,” said Ho.

Pump monitoringInside the suite of applications of Plantweb Insight is Pump Insight.

Due to the high cost to wire instrumentation back to the control system, many pumps in the industry are not monitored — only those that are critical to the process operations are.

P lantweb Ins ight ’s Pump application allows the monitoring of pumps no matter where they are in the plant without the expense of added new wiring. In addition, it

is accessible from mobile devices and is able to display real-time pump status and alerts, which are calculated by pre-built algorithms based on decades of process experience.

According to Joe, a complete pump monitoring system requires the installation of: wireless pressure instruments to measure pressure at the inlet and outlet; a wireless vibration instrument; wireless temperature instruments on the pump and motor; and a wireless flow instrument. Additional instruments may be needed to monitor pump seal, strainer and other systems. Less critical pumps can be instrumented accordingly to monitor fewer points of measurement too.

With the installation, the app prov ides warn ings of pump cavitation, plugged strainers, dead-headed pumps, and early bearing

and gear wear, as well as imminent seal leaks — saving the company from hefty reparation costs and long downtime at the plant.

What’s next?As IIoT continues to grow, more and more customers are starting to understand the importance of it.

“In 2018, we will continue to add on to Plantweb Insight applications. Right now, we have a handful of applications out there, and hopefully this year, we’ll be able to release another five or six more core-on-core apps,” said Joe.

With Emerson’s decades of process experience, Plantweb Insight is set to be the next-generation piece of the Industrial IoT portfolio that extends the power of automation to the entire enterprise. WWA