Instrumentation: Engineers not using their intelligence
8 Aug 2012
London – Over 40% of companies are not using intelligent features embedded within process instrumentation devices, according to a survey of how process instrumentation users employ their instruments.
The ABB survey of 43 companies found that the largest proportion of plant control systems were up to 10 years old, with 47% of systems falling into to this category. Almost 40% was between 11 and 20 years old, with only small minorities being older than this.
Survey respondents were also asked about what percentage of their process instrumentation was intelligent, i.e. based on protocols such as HART, Fieldbus and Profibus.
Just over 51% of respondents said that between 10 and 20 % of their instrumentation had this type of intelligence, while three equal sized groups of around 16% chose the option of 21-40%, 41-60% and 60%+.
Some 57% of companies answering said that they used this intelligence, while 43.2% do not.
Of those that do use it, over 77% employ it to aid instrument maintenance. Other categories are plant optimisation (55%), early event warning (55%), preventive maintenance (64%) and environmental compliance (64%).
When asked which parts of the safety system where certified, 68% said that their emergency shut down system was certified by a body such as TUV or Exida, while other large proportions (65%) ticked the fire and gas and associated instrumentation options.
Associated analysers and environmental monitoring was cited by 43% of respondents.
The ABB survey also examined industry attitudes to upgrading and investing in control systems.
In terms of instrumentation they will be using in the future, HART (4-20mA) headed the list at around 39%, followed by Profibus and wireless (both around 23%), Foundation Fieldbus (10%) and Ethernet IP on 7%.
Over 77% of respondents envisaged significant investment in instrumentation to meet health and safety legislation, while over 70% also intended to invest to meet environmental compliance obligations and improvements in their process efficiency.
Over 60% intended investing in instrumentation to cut energy consumption, while 6.5% would use it for business management information.
