Process Innovations and ACI Services have partnered to introduce a new generation Process Plugin for reciprocating compressors. The new plugin makes it easy to add advanced monitoring and alerting for reciprocating compressors to your PI Vision displays.
- Calculate easy-to-read overall health score metrics
- Compare current asset performance with manufacturer specific methodologies, tables, and curves
- Replace irksome number tables with clearly plotted charts and graphs for monitoring displays
- Identify and alert on unsafe operating patterns
- Provide early warnings for slow trend variances from optimal norms
- Maximize asset utilization, extends asset life, and avoids downtime
See Performance at a Glance
Optimizing performance for reciprocating compressors is especially challenging. Unlike centrifugal compressors which have static potential utilization maps, the multiple loading devices associated with reciprocating compressors make creating an equivalent potential utilization map much more complex.
This plugin features ACI’s eRCM modeling integration. It allows calculation of unit performance based on recorded operating point data. The plugin can compare actual performance to ideal performance (safety, utilization, efficiencies, capabilities, etc.) and creates a Unit Potential Utilization Map that can be overlayed with each unit’s operating pressures (suction and discharge) to visually identify areas of ideal, effective, or marginal utilization of the asset.
The dynamic compressor visualization modules clearly display performance at the individual asset and fleet-wide levels to ensure all your equipment operates in safe conditions while maximizing your throughput or pressure control goals.
Getting started is easy since the existing AVEVA OSIsoft PI Systems at most organizations already collect much of the basic asset data and data histories needed for the plugin’s calculations.
Overall Health Scores
Visual data point mapping makes it easy to check performance at a glance. Process Plugins provide advanced visual layouts of your PI System data to add an intuitive visual dimension to tracking the health and performance of your assets and plant. Skip the complexity of custom configuration with our ready-to-go plugins that run natively within your existing PI System.
The summary view of your assets features simple red, green, and yellow color-coded health scores to make it very easy to quickly identify which compressors in your fleet need optimization. Simply click down for a more detailed view of each one.
Historic Performance and Utilization Mapping
The performance detail display plots actual data points against the unique performance bands for each unit at current conditions. Color codes show relative efficiency: black is high efficiency, blue is marginal, and red is poor. This makes it easy to objectively compare historical performance and utilization against a standard map in a similar way to our plugins for your centrifugal compressors.
Hassle-free Automated Report Generation and Distribution
Process Plugins make it easy to dig down into the numbers when you want to do deep dive analysis. Simply pull the PI data you need into Excel for ad hoc reports. You can fully automate the creation of regular daily, weekly, or monthly reports in Excel, PDF, HTML or CSV formats. The reports engine can also automatically send up-to-date reports via SMTP to a single email address or a distribution list of multiple email addresses. You can opt for FTP/SFTP distribution to store electronic backups of each report or make the report data programmatically available for other systems.
The Power of eRCM
Tired of the Gas Control team using one method to predict unit performance, while the engineers use another, and the PLC/operators are using yet another method to actually control the hardware?
With so many compressors, so many performance methods, so many PLC implementations, and so many restrictions for safe use, ACI’s eRCM Modeling Software provides the ideal solution to model compressor performance. It gets everyone on the same page with optimized performance modeling across all your assets for the entire fleet.
eRCM provides a consistent, user-creatable, field-tunable, thermodynamics-based modeling approach. It fully incorporates OEM methodologies for predicting power, flow, efficiencies, and interstage pressures, as well as OEM specifics for safety (rod loads, pin non-reversals, etc.). eRCM properly models reciprocating compressors precisely the way OEMs expect them to be modeled.
Extend the ROI of your PI System Investment
Benefits for Management Teams
- Empower data driven operational changes for effective collaboration with operations, compressor services, gas control, and integrity management.
- Deliver standardization of key performance indicators (KPI’s) for performance, reliability, cost, and time driven to facilitate comparison of equipment throughout the entire fleet.
- Provide an overall compressor health score that can objectively measure the effectiveness of operational changes to equipment.
- Provide opportunities to increase reliability, efficiency, and time between engine rebuilds
Benefits for Engineering Teams
- Monitor and trend compressor and driver performance.
- Conduct hourly, daily, monthly, and quarterly diagnostics to compare calculated (design) versus actual efficiency.
- Identify compressor optimization opportunities and in return optimizing driver and compressor performance, reducing unnecessary emissions and fuel consumption.
- Increase short-, and long-term reliability by reducing wear on equipment.
- Save time with automated reporting and data exports for other systems.
Required & Optional Inputs
- Compressor Suction Pressure
- Compressor Discharge Pressure
- Compressor Flow (Volume or Mass)
- Compressor Fluid Temperature
- Compressor Motor Amps or Power
- Compressor Speed (if Variable Speed)
- Comp Gas Chromatograph (Methane, Ethane, etc.)
- Barometric Pressure
(Weather.gov,Wunderground, or Real-Time Ambient)
Generated Outputs
- Motor/Engine/Turbine Power
- Actual Suction Flow
- Standardized Volume Flow
- Brake Power
- Adiabatic Discharge Temperature
- Isentropic Efficiency
- Torque Percentage
- Real Time XY Plot: Brake Power vs. Disch Press
(on Load Step Curves)
- Overall Machine Efficiency
- Actual Discharge Flow
- Brake Power Maximum
- Minimum Speed
- Mass Flow
- Real Time XY Plot: Brake Power vs. Suc Press
(on Load Step Curves) - Real Time XY Plot: Flow vs. Disch Press
(on Load Step Curves) - Real Time XY Plot: Flow vs. Suc Press
(on Load Step Curves)
