Many operating process facilities work around highly hazardous chemicals and are faced with having to manage their process risks using sophisticated programmable safety instrumented system (SIS). As one might expect, employing the use of such technology opens up plenty of opportunity for human error such as; incorrectly specifying the wrong technology, level of redundancy needed, as well as properly managing the entire system after installation.
Over the past several years, national and international standards that were focused on the implementation of SIS’s moved towards performance oriented, rather than prescriptive. This simply meant, that these standards didn’t mandate the type of technology, level of redundancy, or maintenance test intervals, etc., instead they described what must be done to manage your process risks to tolerable levels. This was in line with OSHA’s national legislation for the U.S. (29 CFR 1910.119) on process safety management (PSM), which states that users must ‘determine and document’ that their facilities are designed and operating in a safe manner.
Chemical plants and refineries around the world are dealing with unreliable legacy 2-wire flow points and are looking for an upgrade migration path to a more accurate and reliable measurement. Traditionally, Coriolis meters have not been considered part of the 2-wire upgrade option, but Emerson’s recent release of the Micro Motion 4200 2-wire Coriolis transmitter that is now a possibility.
The 2-wire Coriolis flow meter improves reliability by providing an accurate mass flow and density measurement. It accommodates change by replacing unreliable legacy 2-wire devices and optimizing production, ensuring safety by producing accurate fills, resulting in less exposure or spills due to overfilling. Upgrading to 2-wire Coriolis also reduces cost because of reduced need for engineering and planning time.
Owners need easy access to accurate, up to date, engineering information and they need tools that make it simple to keep that engineering data up-to-date over the lifecycle of the plant, reflecting changes due to routine maintenance, turnaround or large-scale revamp projects. It takes too much time and effort to gather and verify the information they need to make decisions effectively, and for older plants that do not have 3D models, there is simply no visual way to verify and check information easily.