Flowmeter upgrade for Austrian crude-oil pipeline

Vienna – Adria-Wien Pipeline GmbH (AWP) has upgraded custody-transfer measurement on the Adria-Wien pipeline in Austria by replacing existing turbine flowmeters with Coriolis devices.

Concerns over reliability and maintenance of the turbine meters prompted our upgrade to the latest measurement technology, according to Walter Fellner at AWP.

For the replacement, the company opted for Emerson’s Micro Motion Elite high capacity flowmeters, because, said Fellner, they are maintenance-free and exceeded our accuracy needs for custody transfer.”

The Adria-Wien pipeline carries crude oil from the Transalpine pipeline at the Italian-Austrian border to the Schwechat refinery near Vienna, Austria.

Emerson supplied two Micro Motion Elite flowmeters with multi-variable digital transmitters. The flowmeters were added to the refinery in-feed lines in a parallel arrangement that allowed them to be installed individually without interrupting the flow of crude oil.

The vendor’s Rosemount 3144P temperature transmitters were also installed to provide accurate line flow temperature measurements, as required by the measuring instruments directive regulations.

The temperature data is used to compensate for the effects of temperature on volume flow in custody transfer applications. Data from the Coriolis flowmeters and temperature transmitters is communicated to the existing host system using an RS485 Modbus connection.

To help AWP ensure the accuracy of its custody transfer measurements, the new Coriolis flowmeters also feature Emerson’s smart meter verification – an automatic diagnostic tool that verifies the complete meter performance, without interrupting the flow measurement or process flow.

This allows meter performance to be tracked without removing it from the pipeline, the suppler noted.