Decoking System Drum Vibration Monitoring System Upgrade

[Apolo]

Hi All,

I’m an Instrument and Control guy in charge for Decoking system in Petron Bataan Refinery Philippines. Our system is provided by Flowserve and is capable of doing fully automated coke cutting process using PLC and drum vibration monitoring controller. Currently, our system uses APEX brand (tied with Flowserve also) for automation of coke cutting and signaling of drum clean condition. However, the current APEX does not have automatic drum calibration feature and coke type(sponge of shot type) handling capability.

Flowserve offered an upgrade to cRIO brand as they are not supporting APEX anymore. Any insights to those refineries who implemented this already? How effective was the upgrade to coke cutting process? Thanks!

[cporterfield]

Apolo,

Flowserve has upgraded several refineries from the APEX system to a National Instruments cRIO Data Acquisition system.
Repsol in Cartagena, Spain
Tupras in Izmit, Turkey
BP in Whiting, Indiana (in progress)

All sites took a few weeks to implement, but were done outside of a major outage. No coke cutting operation was impacted while implementing this change. But all sites were able to utilize a small (several day) outage window to do the actual hardware replacement. Most of the commissioning time was implementing and testing some of the new automation functionality we were able to implement with the cRIO.

[Author]

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