Food & Beverage

Every industry has its special jargon that is like a secret handshake. If you're an insider, you can quickly spot the outsiders based upon their understanding of your industry's jargon and acronyms. For instance, my background was in the offshore oil and gas business back in the mid '80s. We had jargon like pigging (to clean out pipes) and Christmas trees (fittings and valves on the top of well casing which control the well production rate) to name a few.

My friends in Emerson's Life Sciences/Food & Beverage industry center are insiders in their industry jargon. What sparked this rambling opening was when I read a piece in the Asia Food Journal, Tackling CIP Automation with S88. Written by Emerson's Christie Deitz and Yogesh Rathi, they did a great job, right from the start, defining CIP for us outsiders:

Clean-in-place (CIP) is a method of cleaning vessels and lines without disassembling them. It involves delivering solutions of chemical detergents and rinses at specified flow rates and temperatures. Typically, a CIP skid creates the cleaning solutions and routes them to a user skid that requires cleaning.

According to Christie and Yogesh, CIP began in the 1950s as a manual operation. Over time, this process has been largely automated by most food & beverage, pharmaceutical and cosmetic manufacturers. The authors note that many common challenges exist whether CIP is performed manually or automatically. They include:

• Performing similar actions (acid wash, alkali wash) in an efficient way
• Managing CIP timing of available resources like process skids, and supply/return piping paths
• Minimizing CIP time cycle
• Managing distribution headers or transfer panels to process resources requiring cleaning
• For processes with portable CIP skids used in multi-product facilities, providing local control and easy point-of-use connects

Christie and Yogesh describe how the ISA88 (often referred to as S88) standard and terminology for batch control are applied to CIP processes to address these common challenges. The ISA88 model is comprised of both a physical and procedural model.

On the physical model side, one recommendation was to make the distribution headers and/or transfer panels into equipment modules that are independent of the CIP skid and the equipment it connects to in order to clean and sterilize. The path can be managed as a resource, which allows CIP skids to operate in a similar fashion.

The authors pointed out that the physical model helps to drive the procedural model. They wrote:

The sequences that operate the CIP skid equipment become phases on the CIP skid unit, and the sequences that operate on the user skid become phases on the user skid unit. Similar sequences can be modularized or made into reusable, flexible phases. The differences are handled with recipe parameters.

A final key point is that the ISA88 procedural model can be optimized to run phases in parallel to reduce the overall CIP cycle time for processes with fixed CIP skids. Their example:

...while circulating the pre-rinse solution from one of the vessels on the CIP skid to the user, the other vessel on the CIP skid can prepare the acid rinse solution.

Read the article for specific examples of physical and procedural models for fixed and portable CIP skids.

Understanding the jargon around batch processes begins with understanding the ISA88 terminology. Finding and reading articles like this is a good start as is the ISA website's ISA88 page.

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Emerson's Fisher division recently announced a new three-way, temperature-control valve and actuator system. The release highlighted its potential use by process manufacturers:

The new GX 3-way has the ability to accurately control the temperature of water, oils, steam, and other industrial fluids. Applications include heat exchangers and lubricating skids.

For those not well versed with three-way valves, you'll find use for them in both flow mixing (converging) and flow splitting (diverging) applications.

I caught up with Brad Smith, the global GX control valve product manager, about some potential applications for this valve. Brad began by sharing the development objectives for this valve. Typically, when a process manufacturer cannot achieve the required control, they must reassess process-piping arrangements, often going to a 2-valve arrangement. This GX 3-Way valve provides the level of control to avoid re-piping and 2-valve arrangements.

Brad shared with me that the biggest application focus for this 3-way valve is in temperature control around heat exchangers. It was designed for high-capacity applications and precise linear characteristics required for accurate temperature control. Brad cited a specific heat exchanger application in beer brewing where the wort temperature is maintained with a glycol coolant.

Another common application for this 3-way valve is pH control on feedwater to a boiler. When the pH of the feedwater rises beyond a predetermined level, a three-way valve adds fresh make up water to reduce the pH back to target levels.

A third application Brad discussed was for test separator manifolds. Test separators are mainly used in oil & gas production facilities to measure the amounts of oil, gas, and water from the well. The manifold contains three-way valves coming from each wellhead that uses the test separator. Some installations use the three-way valves while others prefer globe valves.

A final application Brad shared was in the steel industry. Rod mills require good temperature water box control.

Most process manufacturers have temperature control applications requiring mixing flow streams or splitting flow streams. This three-way valve might have the flow characteristics and properties your application requires.

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Recently, one of my RSS feeds alerted me to a new Micro Motion 2400S transmitter packaged in stainless steel for the ELITE Coriolis flow and density meter line. This 316L stainless steel packaging is:

Rated to IP66 and IP67, the corrosion resistant stainless steel housing is ideal for applications where instruments are subjected to regular caustic wash-downs, which are typically found in the food, beverage and life science industries. The 316L construction is also ideally suited for marine and offshore environments.

I caught up with Emerson's John Martin, a Food & Beverage industry manager for the Micro Motion family of products. I wanted to get the story behind the design of this product.

For those that have never been inside a food & beverage or pharmaceutical manufacturing process, John shared how you'll be struck by the bright, shiny silver look you see around the process. Hygienic standards are paramount in these industries and a mild caustic (e.g. sodium hydroxide) is often used to wash down the processing equipment. Standard painted-aluminum transmitter housings do not do well in this caustic environment. This new 316L stainless steel housing allows the transmitter to be integrally mounted with the Coriolis meter and provides a local display at the measurement point for the operations personnel.

John noted that normally, transmitters with aluminum and painted-aluminum housings had to be mounted remotely, in stainless steel enclosures or control rooms, to avoid the corrosive environment. This installation method meant more engineering and installation costs.

This 2400S transmitter supports DeviceNet and Profibus DP communications. These are common digital bus communication protocols used by PLCs and other automation systems like Emerson's DeltaV system. Across two wires, these transmitters communicate process and diagnostic information back to the controllers. From the press release:

The result is that one instrument can provide flow, density and temperature measurements, eliminating the need for multiple sensors and the wiring/configuration costs associated with them. In addition, digital communications unlock instrument diagnostic information, such as drive gain, meter verification and other alarms.

John also shared with me that other industries like offshore oil and gas and other marine environments have corrosive environments caused by saltwater and salt in the air, making them good candidates for this stainless steel transmitter housing.

I do know from my days back as an engineer working on offshore Gulf of Mexico oil and gas platforms, that we put the instruments with painted aluminum housing inside 316 stainless steel junction boxes to protect them from the corrosive, salt-air environment. This packaging option might have reduced the size/number of junction boxes required.

Update: I just saw a Twitter "tweet" from @timalosi who reminds me:

there is more to hygenic than stainless. draining is much more important. the Housing is just for looks

Tim, point taken and all in 140 characters or less!

An oft-cited number when discussing the topic of distributed control system (DCS) modernization is $65 billion. This was the size of the installed base systems reaching their end of their useful lives from an ARC Advisory Group study conducted several years ago.

Emerson's Cody Long, a migration/modernization consultant, visited a Latin American sugar mill. This mill had two different, non-Emerson distributed control systems (DCS) near their end of lives. They could no longer grow or be expanded because the systems were no longer actively marketed. The mill was also experiencing field failures with this DCS hardware. Beyond the reliability issues, the mill staff wanted better boiler control by applying advanced process control to improve their existing control.

Cody began his visit to the mill with a site walkthrough to assess current operating conditions and to speak with operations and engineering staff about the challenges they faced. The mill staff was quite experienced in process control and advanced process control. The team understood what some of these tools could do in improving existing control performance.

He discussed options ranging from a complete "rip and replace" of the existing DCSs with a DeltaV system, to a connect solution which keeps some of the existing controller and I/O in place and provides new operator workstations and the ability to expand new areas with DeltaV hardware. This connect method also provides a way to switch over control to the new system in small increments over time.

From his visits over time with process manufacturers, Cody has developed some new tools to quickly analyze the contents and complexity of the existing DCS' database to help immediately formulate a migration strategy.

Project justifications based upon avoiding failures are often difficult to sell to plant management, so typically Cody or a member of the advanced automation team would work with the project team to identify economic benefits based on the operating performance. In this case, it would be through improved boiler control. These benefits would likely include reduced energy usage and fewer boiler trips. These trips impacted overall mill production, which impacts the revenue side of the justification analysis.

The mill staff had this project justification expertise internally, so they were able to get a modernization project approved. The analysis showed the return on investment from a full replacement of the existing DCSs with a DeltaV system justified the cost of the project. The mill would use the existing DCS parts as spares for another mill with similar systems.

Once this project is completed and business results quantified, a similar analysis will be done on the other plant to assess a total replacement or a connect solution.

Continuous manufacturing processes have long benefited from the application of advanced process control (APC) in their processes to improve upon their regulatory control. Batch manufacturing processes have recently been able to take advantage of these technologies. I received an email the other from Lou Heavner, part of Emerson's Advanced Applied Technologies team. We've featured Lou's work here a few times in the past.

I'll summarize a few of these applications with the hopes that it might spark some ideas for application in your batch manufacturing process.

A manufacturer of sweeteners was having scheduling problems caused by the unpredictability of batch cycle times. End of batch could vary between six and twelve-plus hours. The operators could determine when end of batch was reached but not predict when this would occur. The APC consultants worked with this manufacturer to apply neural network technology as an inferential estimator to predict the end of batch time. The model can successfully predict the end of batch plus or minus ten minutes up to four hours before the completion of the batch. Scheduling downstream equipment is more manageable given these accurate predictions.

A second example Lou mentioned was again around batch cycle time, but in this case poor distillation control, which resulted in longer batches. Model Predictive Control was used in this pharmaceutical manufacturing process to control the batch distillation, specifically the reflux. Distillation time was reduced with the overall batch cycle time reduced by more than three hours per batch on average. The net effect of this improved control performance was a five-plus percent increase in production capacity. The quality of the product produced was also improved.

A third example is in a specialty chemical manufacturer's semi-continuous fluid bed hydrogenation reactor. In this process, cold solids are added to the top batch-wise based on level in the vertical reactor. Heated feedstock (gases) enters the bottom to provide the fluidizing medium and heat to drive the reaction. The reactor was a bottleneck, limited by temperature control and high temperature constraint. Adding model predictive control around the reactor provided more stable temperature control. The controller reduced temperature variability and allowed target to be moved closer to constraint limit with fewer high-temperature trips.

I thought these were great examples of advanced control technologies combined with people like Lou with process and APC application knowledge that are solving process problems and improving process efficiency. Perhaps these ideas will spark some ideas for improvement in your operations.

As competitive pressures drive process manufacturers to run their processes more efficiently, a key area of focus is to improve the management of data from various sources. Better, more timely decisions come from better data.

I spoke with one of our Life Sciences/Food & Beverage industry senior manufacturing consultants and data management experts, Gary Silverman about this need to consolidate and migrate data. He cited several reasons for this:

• Updating a historian and/or operating system because it's no longer supported by the original supplier
• Needing to consolidate data from multiple process automation system platforms and other data sources into a single enterprise historian
• Changing business needs requiring broader dissemination of information from the manufacturing process to plant and corporate personnel with web browser-based technologies.

This process of converting and consolidating data sources has historically been quite intensive and time consuming because of the diversity of data formats and the sheer amount of archived data typically seen. By analyzing the business processes and needs of the people accessing the data, our data management consultants determine what tools, reports, and utilities can be used to streamline this conversion process and provide the information required to those who need it.

One example Gary cited was a DeltaV system upgrade project where an AIM/Bile Historian with 9 years of process data collected from a PROVOX system needed to move to an OSIsoft PI historian. The finished solution collected data from the new DeltaV system, PROVOX and utilities programmable controllers. Emerson is an OSIsoft Platinum Partner as a provider of data management and integration services.

The data management team had developed automated tools and methods to extract the AIM tag database, create the PI tag database and migrate this vast amount of data. The team also built a Process Module Database to streamline the implementation of the OSIsoft RtPortal/WebParts technology. The Portal allows operators, aupervisors or engineers to quickly spot problems and then use ProcessBook and/or DataLink to drill down for in-depth analysis. The Portal also provides a central repository for Shift Logs, Operator Logs, etc.

Another key need was being able to perform batch-to-batch analysis with data from over 70 reactors and make comparisons of critical process parameters to discover any deviations from the best or "Golden Batch." PI Batch configuration and the PI Batch Client Tools provided the customer with a means to do this. They were also able to monitor and improve cycle times as a result of this analysis. In the end the project achieved its objectives to modernize the existing technology disseminate information more broadly and provide critical data in Batch context for continuous improvement.

Given the high interest in having better information to help plants run more efficiently, I'll be checking back with Gary and other data management experts from time to time.