Energy & Power, Heating, Cooling & Drying

NEW EMERSON BLOWER HEALTH MONITORING SOLUTION EXPANDS AUTOMATED HEALTH MONITORING, MITIGATES THREATS

Phil Black - PII Editor 08/07/2013

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Integrated monitoring applications are online 24/7 to increase availability, reduce production losses and lower maintenance cost

Emerson Process Management has introduced a Blower Health Monitoring Solution as part of its family of Essential Asset Monitoring applications.

While essential for fired heater or boiler operations, many blowers today are not sufficiently instrumented to perform online health monitoring. High costs for wired solutions have typically resulted in forced and induced draft blowers being monitored only periodically by maintenance checks and during field rounds. Failure symptoms are often missed between manual checks, leaving facilities vulnerable to unexpected failures which can trip a furnace or boiler.

Emerson’s new blower monitoring solution uses a pre-engineered application and networks of wireless or wired instruments that lower implementation costs and provide an early warning system for operations and maintenance staff. The new blower solution expands online, automated monitoring and health analysis to a new class of equipment. The result is reduced manual measurements, increased blower availability, fewer process upsets, reduced production outage and lower maintenance costs.

“Blower failures can trip fired heaters or boilers, resulting in plant slowdowns or shutdowns, or at least some serious upsets,” commented Pete Sharpe, director of industry solutions development, Emerson. “Blower issues can also increase energy costs, reduce throughput, and potentially cause reportable safety and/or environment incidents. Failure is driven by many culprits, which can often be detected early. The most common causes of trips include normal wear-and-tear that causes vibration, lubrication issues, motor alignment, bearing faults, bent blades, louvre drives, and duct or screen blockages.”

The new blower release adds to the growing family of Essential Asset Monitoring solutions, which include monitoring solutions for pumps and heat exchangers, with other asset types under development. Each scalable module provides the user with a selectable set of faults that determine which instruments are needed for that asset. The full solution from Emerson includes the software and any new devices and services required to implement and set it up.