China automation Q&A

Eduardos Pieter Beullens, Bayer MaterialScience PCT systems manager, explains to Patrick Raleigh the automation strategy at the gorup's mega-scale chemicals site near Shanghai:

The Bayer Integrated Site Shanghai chemicals production site in Shanghai, China is the cornerstone of Bayer MaterialScience's production and market strategy in the Asia/Pacific region. Construction of the facilities at the Shanghai Chemical Industry Park represents a total capital expenditure of about $1.8 billion through 2009, making it Bayer's biggest-ever project outside of Germany.

Q. What are Bayer MaterialScience's main criteria for selecting the process automation systems at its new facilities at the Bayer Integrated Site Shanghai?

A. Eduardus Pieter Beullens: Worldwide there are only a few main players in the process automation market and these all have state-of-the-art systems. An important differentiator at the time of the technical benchmark was the level of support for Foundation Fieldbus. Bayer MaterialScience considers Foundation Fieldbus as the cornerstone for future-improved diagnostics of field devices. Features such as embedded advanced control possibilities, object-oriented engineering tools, advanced diagnostics tools and asset management tools were also pre-requisites during the selection.

Local presence of the vendor was also a key factor. Having a good local sales organisation is good but far from sufficient. Of primary importance is the local presence of a well-established and experienced project team and maintenance framework with close ties to the vendor's global support organisation.


Q. Which process control & automation systems has the company installed at the Bayer Integrated Site Shanghai?

A. We have installed the DeltaV system from Emerson in all plants at the site. The configurations are all similar and only differ from each other in terms of size and specific plant requirements, like the need for batch software.

Our strategy is to have only one DCS standard in each site, but multiple DCS systems worldwide because we believe it is essential to keep competition playing its role on a global scale, but not locally. Of course we have to keep in mind that in existing sites we already have different DCS systems and that situation cannot be changed without major investments. Emerson was already present with DeltaV in several sites and as such was not a new vendor but one with a new system.

To guarantee the safety of the plants, we have added an ESD (emergency shutdown system) from Hima. Here we are standardised on the fully redundant configuration. We have standardised to a very high degree the application software, both for the DCS and ESD and the interface between these systems.

Additionally, we have installed the PI system from Osi and the Sapphire system from Labvantage as the Laboratory Information Management System. The systems landscape is completed with a Message Server that offers a platform to analyse discrete events like operator actions and process and system alarms. For this purpose we use the ProcessGuard product from Matrikon. PI and Processguard are worldwide standards within Bayer MaterialScience.


Q. What efficiencies and savings did you achieve or expect to achieve with the new automation technology in China compared with systems in your existing plants?

A. The use of Foundation Fieldbus definitely reduces commissioning time. This was a clear expectation and experience has confirmed this.

Important for the maintenance phase is the possibility offered by Foundation Fieldbus to get enhanced device diagnostics. As we use devices of different manufacturers and there is currently no accepted standard on the contents and format of diagnostic data, today's experience in this area is somewhat disappointing.

There is clearly work to be done, but we are confident that we took a step in the right direction and will benefit from this in the future. We did not face any interoperability issues with any of these devices at all.

Another advantage lies in the use of intelligent devices in conjunction with an asset management system. This provides a central repository for device configuration settings, for an audit trail and allows us to shift more towards preventive instead of reactive maintenance.

The DCS system supports object-oriented engineering tools and bulk editing possibilities. Clearly we have won engineering time with these features. Not only when incorporating late changes, but the object-oriented approach also stimulates the application developers to make a more careful design of the classes since they will be applied throughout the system.

Bulk editing offered us the possibility to automate to a great extent the generation of large parameter sets for the DCS software from the database that was used during the basic and detailed engineering phases.


Q. Did the scale and or complexity of the facilities in China place any particular requirements on the process automation system used?

A.  Bayer MaterialScience is building world-scale plants in BISS and most of the processes in BISS are continuous processes that do not impose special requirements to the basic and advanced control levels within an up-to-date automation system.

We are, however, faced with increasing demands on delivering relevant process-related information in the appropriate environment and with a comfortable, intuitive user interface. This requires a platform for easy data integration and the use of up-to-date information distribution and presentation.

Users are familiar with the virtually endless possibilities the Internet offers and expect to surf through plant information with the same comfort. Worldwide access is a prerequisite and it has to match the company's data security policies.

More and more we see that the automation systems by themselves cannot fulfil these requirements. The MES (Manufacturing Execution System) layer with all related IT technologies plays an important role in our life and the qualification of our automation engineers.



Q. What is the company's strategy for spreading this automation technology to different plants across the group worldwide?

A. Hardware and software standards are developed by, or in close co-operation with, our global systems group in Germany. When new projects are started, the engineers involved are introduced to the standards in case they are not familiar with them yet, and both hardware and software standards are used wherever possible.

Our global systems group has a vital role in this strategy. We also pay a lot of attention to the documentation of special features that are developed to meet specific requirements because we want to feed them back to the global standard and in that way avoid engaging several people in creating similar solutions.

Solutions are implemented on the different systems, so that functionality is to a great extent identical, independent of the system on which it is implemented. An example of this is the Profibus-DP interface between DCS and the variable frequency drives that have been standardised within Bayer MaterialScience.


Q. How can process automation vendors improve the technologies and services they offer in terms of supporting the company's global production strategy?

A.  Pushing the reliability of plants to the highest possible level is a key strategy. This means that the frequency of planned shutdown must be reduced and shutdowns must be shorter.

Moving from reactive to proactive maintenance based on reliable asset data is an important element in this strategy. Further development of asset management tools and unification of the underlying technologies in order to make these tools more open is highly important.

Improved diagnostics will be a key point of attention also in the coming years. The investment in intelligent devices and fieldbus must pay-off, and therefore a joint effort of automation system vendors and instrument vendors is absolutely essential.

Global standards need to be developed and implemented. Process automation vendors should also work to incorporate diagnostics of the supporting infrastructure, like power distribution systems and network infrastructure.