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Driving plant availability to a higher level

WirelessHart in the pharmaceutical industry
Driving plant availability to a higher level

A major PCS upgrade is an ideal chance to step up to a new level of plant availability. Some leading companies in the worldwide pharmaceutical industry have discovered WirelessHart as an enabling technology to gain more insight into their processes while protecting existing investments.

Author Sabrina Weiland Product Marketing Manager Business Unit Automation, Pepperl+Fuchs

Process control technology has not only experienced dramatic developments during recent years. It has also shifted from analogue to digital systems. Yet changing to any of the latest generation PCS solutions is anything but a trivial job. That’s why plant operators generally prefer a targeted technology upgrade which enables new opportunities for improved process control, while protecting high investments in the existing field instrumentation and preserving all those well-established process parameters.
Enabling proactive maintenance
Seamless digital communication is one aspect, but reaching a higher level of device monitoring and plant availability calls for changes that go much deeper and tap all the information provided by modern field devices via the well-established Hart technology.
Hart provides vital benefits, especially for the pharmaceutical industry. Being able to access device status information generated directly at field level not only offers detailed insights into the process itself. It can also be used to collect vital process data for full product traceability and comprehensive quality documentation. Such features are highly important for an industry that is subject to numerous legal regulations and deals with substances that could have a strong impact on human life. But that’s not all: some of the data provided by field instruments can also be used to periodically monitor device health in order to detect upcoming failures at an early stage. Such information is the key to proactive maintenance concepts.
“Proactive maintenance is a key strategy to achieve a higher level of plant availability. But if a company wants to avoid plant shutdowns due to unexpected device failures, it needs to have detailed insights into the state of all devices”, explains Gerrit Lohmann, head of the Remote Systems product group at Pepperl+ Fuchs. This Germany-based company is a leading supplier of infrastructure components for process control systems and is thoroughly familiar with the special requirements of the worldwide pharmaceutical industry.
A DTM or DD is typically used to access device health information provided by field instruments. It triggers an alarm if one instrument falls below a pre-defined performance level or shows signs of deterioration. In addition, all device configuration steps can be handled remotely without any on-site work.
Deep insight free from cables
A major breakthrough in Hart technology is WirelessHart. This wireless solution is fully compatible with the established Hart standard and can therefore be integrated easily into any fieldbus infrastructure. It represents the enabling technology for any situation where wired connections are too costly or simply impossible to install.
Since Coriolis flow meters are Hart compatible, upgrading to a state-of-the-art PCS allows direct communication with the instrument – for example, to obtain up-to-date device health information or configure the instrument remotely directly from the control room.
A pharmaceutical plant wanted to reduce the time-consuming calibration of its Coriolis flow meters to an absolute minimum in order to give plant availability a considerable boost.
The company was recommended to upgrade to a WirelessHart solution from Pepperl+Fuchs. Combining the advantages of Hart with the flexibility of a wireless network, this solution promised a fast and easy way to fully integrate all mass flow meters into the communications infrastructure and use a DTM to monitor instrument health directly from the control room. Realising the tremendous potential for WirelessHart within its production environment, the customer decided to use this application as a pilot installation. The goal was to gain first-hand experience with this wireless technology, which would allow many new applications to be implemented while keeping the effort for conversion to a minimum.
Lohmann points out the benefits: “In this application, WirelessHart was a fast and easy solution to integrate all flow meters into the PCS quickly. As a result, the client was able to replace instrument calibration at fixed intervals with a far more economical, requirements-driven maintenance schedule.”
These huge benefits have meanwhile been confirmed in practice: instead of 250 hours of plant downtime per year to calibrate instruments, this same task is now completed in just 8.3 hours.
Benefitting from open technologies
Pepperl & Fuchs not only has extensive experience with process plants for pharmaceutical production. The company also caters for the requirements of the international process industry and insists on open standards for its products. WirelessHart is one such open stand-ard that guarantees interaction with a vast range of devices from all major vendors.
Amongst other things, it is compatible with the Pactware Device Management software which is used in many plants throughout the pharmaceutical industry and is part of a system design enabling more reliability through better insight.
“Being based on open standards, WirelessHart is a quick and easy way to enable full transparency from the PCS all the way down to field level instrumentation. This has proved to be a perfect starting point for achieving a higher level of efficiency and plant availability”, Lohmann concludes.
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