Yokogawa tracks training trends
1 Sep 2011
Future training requirements in the process industries are heading in the direction of developing and supporting multi-skilled and multi-disciplined employees and contractors, believes Carl Williams of Yokogawa UK’s training centre in Runcorn, Cheshire.
According to Williams, process plant operators want training providers, such as Yokogawa, to offer a wide range of generic training courses to support product-specific courses. Customers’ requirements, typically, range from one-day ’introduction to safety systems’ courses to five-day DCS and safety engineering events, functional safety engineering courses, and courses/modules in process control instrumentation (PCI).
In line with these demands, Yokogawa UK’s training centre provides training for all levels of plant personnel, including engineers, maintenance technicians and operators. Areas covered include both Yokogawa product-specific courses and generic subjects such as PCI, project planning or MES software, as well as customised training.
The training unit is currently developing Institute for Measurement and Control-accredited PCI training courses and has designed and built site-located integrated training systems for customers. Five PCI training courses in pressure, temperature, flow, level and liquid analysis are already IMC accredited and can be used towards gaining chartered engineer status.
Yokogawa’s training systems allow customers to teach operation and maintenance personnel on a fully integrated system in an off-line, real-time or simulated environment. The equipment can include DCS, SIS, Modbus, Foundation Fieldbus, Profibus and so on.
“This affords a student the chance to experience operational functionality similar to their process in a safe and controlled environment,” Williams said.
“Training systems can be set up to generate or simulate ’live’ plant scenarios for off-line study and analysis; they can also be used for the safe development and testing of new and/or enhanced applications before implementing them in the target system.
“Operators and maintenance personnel can gain valuable process skills on a real-time simulated system where they can experience ’out of normal’ process plant scenarios, for example, alarm flooding, which would otherwise only be realised if there was an actual incident on the real process plant.”
Should a plant failure occur, a customer can use the training system to simulate the scenario which caused the failure, or, in an emergency, use the components from the training system to effect a temporary plant repair, said Williams. Yokogawa, he added, supports each training system with ’included’ training days at the customer’s premises and detailed training manuals, which allows training to better focus on the client’s specific needs.
The Runcorn centre is also supporting training enterprises and technical colleges in training apprentices and technicians with a water-and-air process skid an integrated system set-up, including instrumentation running Yokogawa’s Centum VP DCS and Prosafe RS safety applications.
