From minor to major

Starting with just four engineers making electric meters in 1915, Yokogawa has come a long way in the world of process control and automation — and aims to go much further, as Mike Spear found at the company’s 90th anniversary celebrations in Tokyo.

‘Our goal is to become the world’s number one player in the industrial automation business by the year 2010’, says Isao Uchida, president and ceo of Yokogawa Electric Corporation, the company founded in 1915 by Dr Tamisuke Yokogawa. Uchida was speaking at the global symposium that formed part of the company’s Technology Innovation Fair, held in Tokyo at the end of October to celebrate its 90th anniversary.

As a statement of intent, this was pretty unequivocal, but it was backed up by presentations and displays of technological achievements and developments that suggest the company really is about to break out from the perception many have of it as a global player, yet one buoyed up by a dominant home market.

At the company’s impressive world headquarters in nearby Mitaka, Industrial Automation (IA) division general manager Saturo Kurosu explained that Yokogawa’s IA business today breaks down into 55% of revenue from Japan, 23% from Asia (including China and the Middle East), 14% from Europe and Africa, and 8% from North and Latin America. Total IA revenues were just over $1.9billion, representing some 53.3% of the company’s global turnover.

By 2010, however, Japan’s contribution is expected to fall to only around 30% of the total, as the other geographical sectors continue to grow in line with Yokogawa’s expected 10% compound annual growth rate. As the IA business has been growing at this rate from 2001 to 2004, while the expected overall market growth worldwide through to 2010 is only about 3%, then Uchida’s ambition starts to appear more achievable.

Of the IA business today, some 62% is for systems, engineering and services, with the remainder accounted for by the company’s wide range of field instruments, analytical equipment and recorders. Yokogawa’s growth plan for the core systems and engineering part of the business — essentially the DCS (distributed control system) market, in which it boasts the Centum CS3000 R3 integrated control system — is for 8-10% annual growth, compared with the ARC Advisory Group’s worldwide market forecast of 2-4%. On the services side, taking in remote diagnostics and life-cycle partnerships with customers, even higher growth is planned; although, at 12-14%, only slightly above ARC’s expectation of 8-10% for the services market as a whole.

By far the largest growth plan, however, is the one that Yokogawa has put in place for its field instruments. At an expected 14-16% year-on-year growth, this outstrips the market’s anticipated annual growth rate of just 3-6%. Some of the reasons for the company’s bullish view of its future share of the field instrument market are highlighted in the panels, but according to Kurosu the main market dynamics include: the growth in fieldbus-based projects; the emergence of FDT/DTM and EDDL technology to facilitate the interfacing of fieldbus devices; the rapidly growing interest in wireless field devices; and the IPv6 internet protocol.

Examples of Yokogawa’s ongoing responses to the first three of those drivers are highlighted in the panels below. For the future of IPv6, manwhile, it is currently developing chips that can be embedded into field instruments to provide secure ‘plug-and-play’ that will enable sensors and devices in the field to connect securely with networks. This development is in line with the company’s vision of ‘ubiquitous field networks, which cover the entire production field, and are then connected to external open networks.’

Backward compatability

Yokogawa’s semiconductor developments also take in many other key devices for its ranges of field instruments, together with some interesting work on MEMS (micro-electrical-mechanical systems) technology that has application in the trend towards microreactors and microchemical plants.

While such miniaturisation of chemical processing is one very much for the future, Yokogawa takes evident pride in being able to trace its DCS roots back to 1975 (although Honeywell might take issue with Yokogawa’s assertion that the Centum was the world’s first DCS). And not merely trace its systems back that far, but still be able to offer ‘full backward compatibility’ from one generation to the next, as explained by Toshiaki Shirai, manager of the IA systems division.

Its biggest DCS project to date (not counting the ongoing and extraordinarily distributed NAM-GLT gas field development project in Groningen in the Netherlands) is the soon to be completed CSPC Nanhai complex in Guangzhou, China, detailed above. Recent contracts worth over $200million have also been awarded for several major projects in the Middle East, secured through Yokogawa Middle East based in Bahrain. Other recently awarded large projects range across the globe from a Shell NORCO ethylene complex modernisation in the US, through a BP-Sonatrach gas production facility in Algeria, to offshore and LNG projects for a Shell joint-venture on the Sakhalin II complex in Russia.

Providing continuing support to all Yokogawa users around the world is the responsibility of a chain of Global Response Centres, one of which is based at Mitaka. Others are located in China, the US, the Netherlands and Singapore. With 24-hour, 365-days a year operation, these highly sophisticated call centres — if that is not a misnomer for a service staffed by experienced engineers who can instantly access configuration details on all customers’ systems — fully support Uchida’s confidence when he says: ‘We are committed to taking full responsibility over the entire lifecycle of our customers’ plant.’

That confidence is not misplaced. According to accumulated data taken from Centum DCSs around the world, the availability of these systems has reached ‘seven nines’, or 0.999999953. Uchida says this is the equivalent of registering just one minute of system failure over an operating period of 40 years.

****************************************************************************

Project execution experience

Addressing the global symposium during Yokogawa’s 90th anniversary celebrations, Simon Lam paid tribute to the company’s involvement in the CSPC (CNOOC and Shell Petrochemicals Company) Nanhai petrochemical project. Lam is ceo of CSPC, the joint-venture set up in 2000 to oversee the $4.3billion complex at Guangzhou in Southern China, which is due to start up by the end of the year.

Similar in scale to the SECCO complex recently commissioned in Shanghai, CSPC Nanhai is a nine-plant complex centred on an 800 000tpa ethylene cracker. Worldscale downstream plants will produce low and high density polyethylene, polypropylene, ethylene oxide/ethylene glycol, styrene monomer, and a range of polyols and glycols. According to Lam, the complex is ‘98% complete, with the finish expected by the end of December’.

Already finished is the work of the main automation contractor (MAC), Yokogawa, with all systems currently in test mode. Again like SECCO, Nanhai is totally Foundation Fieldbus based, but with 16 000 devices it will overtake SECCO as the world’s largest FF system when it comes on stream. Unlike SECCO, however, with its one enormous central control room, Nanhai features three control rooms with 15 field auxiliary rooms.

As with Emerson’s involvement with SECCO, where it was called Main Instrument Vendor but essentially had a similar role to an MAC, Yokogawa had to coordinate the work of six international EPC contractors, not of all of whom were familiar with FF. This called for early involvement at the FEED (front-end engineering design) stage of the project to ensure there was plant-wide consistency across the multiple EPCs. Meanwhile at the tail end of the project, Yokogawa was praised by Lam for the way in which it was able to adapt to the late supply of essential configuration information for some of the systems.

The scope of the main CSPC control system takes in the Centum CS3000 DCS, the PRM (Plant Resource Manager) asset management system, the Exaquantum plant information management system, the Foundation fieldbus itself, and the MAS logistics automation system, along with integration with the site-wide SAP system.

Yokogawa and Shell have over 20 years’ experience of working together and were the orginators of the MAC concept in 1996. For CSPC Nanhai, Lam says delivery was on time and within budget, despite the late configuration changes, the new technology is performing well, and Yokogawa has now been awarded the DCS maintenance contract.

****************************************************************************

Widening the world of wireless

In common with most of the major control vendors, Yokogawa is placing great store by the future for wireless technologies. On display at the Technology Innovation Fair were what the company calls ‘temporal sensors’ — basically sensor devices that automatically connect to networks and start working without the need for system configuration. Implemented in a plug and play style, these devices can be used to monitor data to analyse causes of failure, or to set up temporary monitoring points during system installation or inspections, all without any need for additional wiring.

Another interesting application demonstrated how maintenance and diagnostic information can be extracted from a 4-20mA network just by changing the wire-based field device to a unit with wireless functions, again without the need for any new wiring.

Yokogawa’s wireless solutions are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standards (also known as ZigBee) and it is focusing on features such as versatile power-saving control functions for battery-powered operation, and such systems’ capability of managing up to 60 000 points on a network.