Controls Pre-commissioning Is Like Checking your Parachute Before Jumping…A Very Wise Decision.
Wednesday October 19, 2016
Wouldn’t you want to make sure your parachute rip chords are OK before jumping out of a plane? Me too. Safety first, right? Well, it’s the same idea with performing a pre-commissioning controls checkout of your plant before going live the first time. Ask yourself…Is your Distributed Control System control logic configured correctly? The answer is likely “no – but what can I do about it?”. How about the Programmable Logic Controllers? The Emergency Shut Down System? The Turbomachinery Controls? The Burner Management System? And so forth…
To quote Donald Rumsfeld– “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns.” A great quote taken out of context but directly relevant – we simply do not know how good our controls are prior to commissioning.
What if I told you that a large refinery used dynamic simulation to do pre-commissioning tests on seven separate refinery units. They identified more than 1200 logic and control configuration issues in a completely safe and cost-effective manner prior to their plant going live. Whew! This is actually the norm and not the exception. And who do you think became the hero in that story? The plant manager, of course…and anyone else in the company who had the foresight to employ a dynamic simulat...