The CEO of Wisconsin-based ExperTune, John Gerry, believes that the launch of a new standard opens the door for many companies to extract greater efficiency - and, therefore, profitability - from existing plant and procedure, without expensive installations of the latest 'gee whiz' hardware.He explained, "HDA is a new standard from the OPC Foundation, of which ExperTune is a member, and it stands for Historical Data Access. It gives clients, such as OSI's PI, access to historical assessment and diagnostic data within PlantTriage (PT) - an affordable software package that is continually analyzing, diagnosing, and storing a history of these assessments." Mr.
Gerry, recipient of an Award for software innovation at the last ISA Conference, continued, "With PT and HDA, engineers gain access to the performance history of a plant. The assessments are available in real-time, too, just after they are calculated via standard OPC data access." This unique package from ExperTune, already being adopted by process plants worldwide, has now expanded its reach with the availability of HDA-based analysis.
Now that it is an HDA server, users can capitalize on hidden savings from their process with the power and flexibility of this program.Holder of 4 patents in process control and a member of the ExperTune team, Tom Kinney, explained, "In many cases, a key event or operating period captured in the PlantTriage assessments could bring significant additional benefit to plant operations." He elaborated, "This is because its analyses and diagnostics are continually historized, saving the time usually required to repeat important tests or to capture cause-and-effect from prior events. The assessments for all control loops in the plant are now accessible plant-wide, via an HDA OPC interface.""
As PT models process dynamics from historical data, important process models can be developed, validated, and refined from historical data - saving time and money, and eliminating the need for potentially costly tests on the plant." Tuning for performanceMr. Gerry added, "In these days of fierce competition in almost any vertical sector, in the USA or in the global marketplace, plant owners and operators are urgently seeking ways to optimize output while, at the same time, curtailing costs."" Industry is about to welcome the new OPC standard with open arms, because of the cost-savings that it makes possible.
Now, the monitoring and analysis procedures built into PlantTriage enable engineers to identify the bottlenecks, take remedial action, and extract the optimum performance from legacy plants." More information: Tom Kinney, ExperTune Inc. 4734 Sonseeahray Drive, Hubertus, Wisconsin WI 53033, USA.
Tel: +1 262 628 0088 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.expertune.com
