Predictive intelligence is where it’s at

British Petroleum (BP) sees the vast majority of the opportunities to leverage wireless technology to be in the retrofitting of existing facilities.
David Lafferty, chief technology officer at BP, had concerns years ago when BP allowed Emerson to run field trials at its Cherry Point, Wash., facility. “I could see the looks on the faces of the Emerson engineers when I showed them what I wanted monitored and where,” he said Monday at the Emerson Global Users Exchange in Nashville, Tenn. “They had some real doubts about pulling the job off, too.”
From that day of attempting to monitor the heat output of a motor bearing in a fan at that BP plant, which was in a hazardous, filthy location, wireless has come a long way.
Now Emerson figures its wireless technology will address not only the needs and the future of a legacy-instrumented plant, but will serve in state-of-the-art, brand new plants.
The company punctuated its confidence in wireless by introducing a $15,000 “wireless starter kit” on Monday. It wants to get “the everyman” and “everyplant” involved in the technology and figures that buy-in can’t be much less expensive than this.
The package—Wireless SmartPack Starter Kit—has five wireless instruments that form a mesh network, AMS software, and a gateway to network with the existing DCS or bus technology. Emerson will also send an engineer to install the kit if the user so needs.
“This is enough to cover a single process unit, like a cracker, and the payback will be in a matter of weeks,” said Bob Karschnia, director of technology for the Rosemount Measurement Division.
—Nicholas Sheble