The major annual exhibition event for the larger automation and control instrument suppliers no longer takes place at a commercial exhibition: it is now the norm for them to organise their own ‘User Group’ meeting for invited customers, in separate events in the Americas, Europe (EMEA) and Australasia. These majors – Honeywell, Emerson, ABB and Yokogawa (previously also Invensys) – also allow sub-suppliers to exhibit, and charge them for the privilege: and the presentations hammer home their capabilities.
GE joins the trend
In February each year, GE Oil & Gas organises a similar event at its major manufacturing base in Florence, Italy: this is the only part of GE that seems to have joined this trend. Over 1000 oil industry managers attended this year, and while surrounded by GE pumps, compressors and Lufkin beam pumping units, they listened to an ‘industry-led’ discussion from oil and gas operator companies around the world, about the state of their business, and how to progress. This was a different style of user group meeting, and refreshing: but there was little evidence of the instrument products from Druck or Bently Nevada, and only a brief outline of the new ‘Safire’ multi-phase flowmeter from the business that was Panametrics.
IoT is the platform
Separately, the GE Intelligent Platforms (GEIP) business is promoting its expertise in the ‘Internet of Things’ (IOT), based on experience gained over the past five or more years, in a recent travelling roadshow in Europe, called ‘Predict for Profit’. Because of the sales of big GE rotating machinery, like compressors, turbines and pumps, and maintenance contracts with performance guarantees – eg for equipment on LNG liquefaction trains in Australia – GE needed to develop a sophisticated remote monitoring system to gain advance warning of any potential problems. The objective was to monitor their equipment, anywhere in the world, from a base where data could be analysed and compared to previous experience on similar equipment. As with any similar software system offering, the product seems to be sprinkled with clever names using word combinations, so this is called the Proficy Monitoring and Analysis Suite (PMAS), integrating the Proficy Historian with analytics from Proficy SmartSignal.
Sensors on the machinery are linked, using a VPN over the Internet, to transmit temperature, vibration and other performance data back to GE: they have invested over $1bn in a new software centre of excellence in San Remo, California, the hub of their network of monitoring bases around the world: others are located in Germany, South Africa and SE Asia, plus Chicago, USA. Data for each machine is compared to its own previous data, plus the information from other similar machines, and deterioration identified. Brian Courtney, general manager of the GE Industrial Data Intelligence product group explained: “The industrial Internet is all about gathering much more data, industrial big data, more efficiently and over longer periods of time, and using advanced analytics to interpret this data in more meaningful ways. PMAS brings this to life to help customers collect, organise, and analyse equipment and process data to maximise productive output and lower operating costs, with fast payback and low risk.” The Proficy SmartSignal incorporates the experience of the Bently Nevada System 1 vibration signature analysis, and adds experience from all other users.
This all makes sense for GE and its oil and gas products, and then when you add that GE also does the same job monitoring its aero engines (only recently Internet enabled while the aircraft are in the air): also GE is involved in the production of 30% of the electric power in the world, so they have a lot of need for this technology in-house. They have been actively involved in this for five years or more, and only now really turn their attention to offering it more aggressively commercially. GE has provided this system to Total SA, for its oil exploration and production sites worldwide, and Total has established its own monitoring centre in France to run the GE SmartSignal Software. “Total has a very large fleet of rotating turbo-machinery,” said Bernard Quoix, head of rotating machinery for Total Group. “The objective of this solution is to monitor these ... and produce appropriate alerts and alarms when abnormal running conditions are present. This will allow our maintenance and engineering teams to analyse and launch appropriate maintenance actions.” Total has not experienced any catastrophic breakdowns since starting this system.
Internet security in the mix
GE did not discuss its approach to Internet security, but Big Drum Engineering from Germany undertakes similar worldwide monitoring of its filling machines, supplied to such customers as Nestlé and Unilever (in South Africa as well as other countries) for the ice cream and general foods industry – who expect 100% system availability, and high data security. Big Drum has been offering remote machine monitoring for 10 years – all its systems, typically using PLCs from Allen-Bradley, have remote service access. To ensure Internet security for both the customer and its data, Big Drum installs the mGuard Gateway from Innominate Security Technologies, part of Phoenix Contact. This Internet interface provides a VPN-enabled Ethernet router and a configurable firewall with a dynamic packet filter, to block any unwanted traffic.
Nick Denbow spent 30 years as a UK-based process instrumentation marketing manager, and then changed sides – becoming a freelance editor and starting Processingtalk.com. Avoiding retirement, he published the INSIDER automation newsletter for five years, www.iainsider.com, and now acts as its EMEA editorial correspondent. His blog is on www.nickdenbow.com
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