Digitalizing Asset Health Maintenance Process to Improve Overall Plant Performance

Summary

Problem statement

Maintaining the process plant assets (mechanical equipment or field devices) is a critical and cumbersome duty. Most of the plant engineers go for a calendared maintenance, but even it has blind spots. Assets do not fail as per a plan. Even after your watchful eyes, the constant deterioration of the plant assets may cause unexpected failures that may cause severe damage to the plant processes, other machines or equipment, and asset operators.

Two major concerns that prevent the plant operators from maintaining assets digitally are: lack of normalized field diagnostic data and absence of an IAMS application to predict asset failure.

The heterogeneous make of the process plant assets restricts the plant engineers from analyzing the assets’ health due to inconsistent device data pattern. On top of this, the lack of an asset manager platform makes it difficult to have a comprehensive view of all the assets’ health.

Challenges

Due to the non-availability of the normalized device diagnostic data at a central point of access, plant operators and asset maintenance engineers face some critical challenges like the following:

• Difficulties in identifying outlier failures
• Unplanned shutdowns causing loss of production
• Troubleshooting and repairing failed/damaged assets take more man-hours causing rising asset idle time
• Manual maintenance unable to account for constant abrasions of plant assets
• Depleting device performances go unnoticed often
• Complex to manage huge asset fleet manually

Solution

To solve the aforementioned issues, Utthunga proposes solving the aforementioned issues using uDDx Suite to normalize device diagnostic data and an asset health manager application to help the maintenance engineer to analyze this data in order to predict asset failure.

This challenge can be resolved in 3 steps:

• Step 1: Using the existing FDT-enabled IAMS systems and the physical communication network that includes gateways, devices, multiplexers, I/Os, etc.
• Step 2: Installing Utthunga’s uDDx Suite as part of the FDT-enabled IAMS application. uDDx suite will use IAMS communication channel to retrieve the device diagnostics and status related information in a normalized fashion. This enables the IT applications to consume the data.
  • uDDx Suite will poll the critical asset diagnostic data such as device Identification, device diagnostics, process values, device core parameters, etc., using its DTM component. Later uDDx Suite’s OPC UA component will use this data to construct OPC UA information model according to the PADIM standard.
• Step3: Install Utthunga’s asset health manager application and configure to communicate with the uDDx Suite. The asset health manager application will retrieve the asset health data from the uDDx Suite and publish on the comprehensive dashboard. It will allow the users to get a snapshot of various device health statuses categorized based on NAMUR NE 107 with alert details. It will allow the maintenance engineer to prioritize the troubleshooting/maintenance actions accordingly.

Benefits

By deploying the above solution in the process plants, the plant operators and maintenance engineers will achieve the following benefits:

• 10% reduction in unplanned shutdowns
• 75% cut in troubleshooting time as maintenance activities can be planned before the assets stop working
• 1500 man-hours reduced due to the ability to configure and calibrate assets remotely using IAMS application
• One access point to view all the alerts based on the device health status

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