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When talking to industry experts about the potential of Industrial Internet of Things in the O&G and chemical industry, it quickly became evident that a lack of manual valve position insights was a huge pain point.
Leveraging the capabilities of IIoT reduces reaction time from days to minutes, improves safety, reduces spills and improves existing processes. When implemented correctly, it is easy to scale and while the number of use cases and type of sensors increase, the availability of data will increase as well. The upside is evident, and implementation will create immediate returns, IIoT technologies are changing the way we can manage our plants and will increase safety significantly.
The industry challenge
Even though LockOut / TagOut (LOTO) is one of the most significant programs in preventing injury and saving lives during maintenance, unfortunately it is also one of the most misused2 standards in the world. Many incidents and accidents still happen daily where the energy source is not correctly isolated or when the isolation is removed unauthorized.
LOTO programs are created to protect people from dangerous energy sources such as electricity, pressure, steam, or other forms of hazardous flows. To create a safe working condition, the energy sources must be isolated for safe working.
The Oil & Gas (O&G) and Chemical industries are considered highly dangerous industries. High pressure, flammable gasses, toxic gases, and danger of explosion are threats that need to be considered while working in this environment. Energy can be stored and released through chemical reactions. Therefore Safety, is the number 1 priority in the facilities since workers are exposed to these dangers daily.
The fluids and gases containing or generating energy are often controlled through valves. There are many motor-operated valves and even more manual valves. Verifying whether a valve is either fully open or fully close is an important aspect of operating and maintaining a plant safely. LOTO procedures are often part of the process to make sure manual valves or other types of isolations are in the correct position.
Ideally, the valve is Motor operated or has a positioner installed, and digital verification of the valve position is used to validate if processes are followed correctly. However, there are thousands of manual valves in a plant and many different types of manual valves exist, which creates a practical and economical challenge to apply existing valve positioning technology to the manual valve to confirm its position.
Lockout / Tagout
Lockout / tagout or LOTO is used in many industries as a safety practice that helps to protect employees in their day-to-day work. Can you imagine when dangerous situations would only be highlighted through verbal communication and people would inform each other not to open or close a valve? Misinterpretation of these warnings have serious consequences and people could become severely injured.
The padlocks or tags create awareness to employees to not use or operate it.
LOTO is a systematic process, generally consisting of six steps 1:
Step 4, is often a separate procedure by itself, this is described in written procedures or digital isolation management software programs, followed by a second and sometimes third visual check as part of a so called four or six eye principles indicating how critical this process is.
Challenges of LOTO
As indicated by OSHA2, LOTO is still the 4th most violated standard. According to OSHA this is not new, the same standards get violated year after year. Whether it is on purpose or accidental, many reports3 claim that human error or the human factor is part of the root cause in more than 70% of the researched cases concerning accidents in O&G. People make mistakes, that is a fact, only in O&G it can have a catastrophic consequence due to the high-risk environment.
Murpy’s law: “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. It is only a matter of time.”
Highly scalable solution
Due to the high number of manual valves, it was clear that the solution acceptable to the industry with the potential of large-scale roll outs needed to be low-cost.
This challenge can be split in two parts, first part is to identify the position of the valve without too much customization. The second part of this challenge was to get a reliable (wireless) signal in the control room.
With the Aloxy valve position solution both challenges are met, it is a universal solution that can easily be installed on any type or size of valve without customized brackets.
Current mounting solutions used in the industry
The Aloxy Pulse sensor consists of various inertial sensors to detect vibrations & movement, inclination and rotation and magnetic fields. An algorithm developed by Aloxy will translate this into the valve position. Because of this technology, no direct linkage is required to transfer the valve movement to the pulse sensor. The pulse sensor simply needs to be installed on the hand wheel or lever of the manual valve to follow the open and closing movements of the valve operator.
The Pulse sensor mounted on multiturn and quarter turn valves
LoRaWAN
The second part of this challenge is to create a signal in the control room at low cost.
The Aloxy valve position solution uses LoRaWAN4 for wireless communication, this is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology.
LPWAN network environments are relatively low cost, they need a limited number of gateways due to the long range and are easy to implement as a private network. For LoRaWAN, also public network infrastructure is available in some countries.
Closing the loop!
Having a low-cost sensor that can be applied to every manual valve and communicates wirelessly to the control room, makes it possible to have the valve positioning data available in the control room. This can be used in a dashboard or existing digital permit to work systems to confirm the valve is in the correct position according to the procedure.
Before proceeding with signing off on a procedure or work permit, an additional check is done from the control room to verify all valves have been operated to the correct and safe position.
When maintenance work is in progress an alarm is generated if a valve is operated unauthorized and immediate action can be taken to prevent that this leads up to a catastrophic event.
The initial procedures remain leading and when a discrepancy occurs between the data and the feedback from the field, it is time to double check! This can highlight mistakes or misinterpretations in an early stage and prevent possible catastrophic consequences.
Additionally, the operational data is time stamped and logged, and can be used in root cause analysis or process evaluations.
New smart programs designed to monitor, diagnose, and control processes will soon become the foundation of how teams make decisions in the field. The benefits of mobile devices used in operations are apparent but need data points to work with. These programs will also make people act in minutes rather than days since the data is based on “real time” information.
When the Aloxy valve monitoring solution is applied to manual valves and the actual position of a manual valve is always available in the control room and mobile devices in the field, it provides an additional validation layer. Additionally, the system generates an alarm when the valve is operated unauthorized to react swiftly.
Operation and maintenance departments would be less vulnerable to visual checks or human error when applying LOTO procedures supported by digital feedback. The safety of workers would increase, and the number of spills would decrease significantly.
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